Authoritarian Indoctrination through Selective Repression

• In Event: Demand for and Consequences of Propaganda in Authoritarian Regimes

Abstract

How does highly targeted authoritarian repression affect political behavior? While coercion tends to backfire, I hypothesize that focusing repression on opposition leaders might substantially diminish opposition movements' human capital and limit their development. This is particularly relevant due to leaders' high social status: liberal professionals, doctors, or civil servants frequently have such a role. Repressing them means purging the catalyzers of alternative ideas, which ensures authoritarian regimes' monopoly on narratives and socialization processes. To test this claim, I combine digitized records of individual trials executed by the Fascist war court during the Spanish civil war (1936-1939) in Galicia with original postwar archival data on political behavior in authoritarian and democratic elections and at the municipality level. Results suggest that focusing repression on civic leaders enhances support for autocratic proposals and the regime's successor parties. In line with the indoctrination hypotheses, repressing school teachers and professors emerges as the driver of the main effect. The main results stand when employing worldwide cross-country data on types of repression and turnout in non-democratic elections or examining Pinochet's legacy on democratic behaviors in Chile. This paper contributes to the existing literature on dictatorships and socialization by paying attention to a second-order effect of violence and connecting two tools previously treated as separate and complementary: repression and indoctrination.

Author

• Sergi Martinez, European University Institute