The Shadow Cost of State Violence: Evidence From Bureaucratic Purges in China

State violence inflicts obvious direct costs on its victims, but many of its significant consequences may be indirect. Building on the literature on principal-agent problems in authoritarian regimes, we argue that coercion against bureaucrats motivates them to pursue over-zealous goals at social costs. We test this argument by studying how bureaucratic purges in China under Mao impacted the behavior of local bureaucrats during the Great Leap Forward, a campaign that caused over 30 million deaths from mass starvation. Exploiting variations in purge intensity across about 1350 counties, we find the purge intimidated local bureaucrats into inflating grain production figures and extracting excessive amounts of grain from farmers, which resulted in significant increases in famine mortality. The results highlight the perils of “accountability by violence” in authoritarian regimes.