Making a career in dictatorship : the secret logic behind repression and coups
Christian Glässel
Bok · Engelsk · 2026
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| Omfang | sider
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| Opplysninger | "Who loyally carries out the dictator's dirty work? And which individuals actively conspire against the leader? This book explains such extreme behavior by examining the inner workings of the authoritarian security apparatus and the career pressures faced by individual officers. The unified theory accounts for participation in repression (extreme loyalty) and coups (extreme disloyalty) by focusing on organizational promotion systems and the pressures faced by those at the losing end. Officers disadvantaged in their professional advancement have strong incentives to prove their loyalty to the current leadership through repression or to commend themselves to a successor regime by waging a coup. Using individual-level career data on all 14,700 army officers in Argentina, the book systematically traces biographic differences between henchmen, coup plotters, and other members of the officer corps. It finds that officers stuck within the hierarchy and threatened with forced retirement were more likely than their peers to either force their way up in a coup or detour to repressive units in the hope of salvaging their careers. Three qualitative case studies substantiate how career pressure led to extreme (dis)loyalty in Hitler's Nazi Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, and Jawara's Gambia. Finally, a global analysis of authoritarian regimes (1945-2020) reveals fundamental interdependencies between repression and coups, shaped by officers' career pressures. Together, the book's findings have implications for understanding career trajectories in both nepotistic and meritocratic systems, the bottom-up dynamics of regime survival and collapse, and bureaucratic compliance and sabotage beyond the security apparatus"-- Provided by publisher.
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| Emner | |
| Geografisk emneord | |
| ISBN | 9780197831182. - 9780197831199
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