Cadres and Careers. The Management of the GDR's Authoritarian Bureaucracy.

• In Event: Authoritarian Bureaucracies, Coercion and Social Order

Abstract

Autocracies need committed bureaucrats to implement policies, acquire information about citizens' preferences, and carry out repression to remain in power. How do dictators build and manage such an apparatus of loyal and committed public servants at-scale? What strategies are best suited to mitigate agency problems and induce loyalty and effort by street- and mid-level bureaucrats? What kind of individual advances in an authoritarian bureaucracy? And how does the management of the bureaucracy affect the short and long-term performance and stability of authoritarian rule? Through examining the German Democratic Republic's cadre program, this book sheds light on the management of large-scale bureaucracies in authoritarian regimes. The authors investigate the role of cadres' loyalty and competence, indoctrination, and personal networks for career advancement. To explain how these variables shape bureaucrats' careers, the authors combine a dataset of about 400 000 cadres, collected by the GDR regime itself, with modern methods of causal inference and machine learning. This allows them to study bureaucratic politics in the GDR in unprecedented detail. The book's findings provide new micro-level insights into the street-level and `middle management' levels of autocratic rule. The book's quantitative approach also offers a novel political science perspective into the history of one of the Soviet Union's most advanced satellite states.

Authors

• Alexander De Juan, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies

• Felix Haass, German Institute of Global and Area Studies

• Jan Henryk Pierskalla, Ohio State University