Guardians of the regime: secret police formation in autocracies

Abstract Autocrats use secret police to stay in power, deterring and suppressing opposition to their rule. Existing research suggests that secret police succeed at this but also that they are not as ubiquitous as one may assume. We thus explore under which conditions secret police emerge in dictatorships. We develop a theoretical framework for potential predictors and apply statistical variable selection techniques to identify which of several candidate variables extracted from the literature on state security forces and authoritarian survival hold explanatory power. Our results suggest that secret police are more likely to emerge where rulers face structural, regime-external threats, such as organized anti-system mobilization and international rivals, witness successful regime-internal contestation abroad, and have sufficient material resources and personalized power to establish such organizations. This research contributes to our understanding of autocrats’ institutional choices and authoritarian politics.