Domestic surveillance and political imprisonment: Evidence from the former GDR

How does domestic surveillance affect the frequency of political imprisonments in autocratic states? In contrast to conventional wisdom, I argue that surveillance reduces the frequency of political imprisonments. Surveillance decreases uncertainty about the correct targets of repression allowing for more selective detentions and shifts to silent forms of repression. To investigate these claims, I draw on a unique dataset of political imprisonment in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) between 1984 and 1988 and county-level statistics on the numbers of spies and incidents of silent repression. I proxy the number of monitored individuals with newly collected county-level data on surveillance operations. I use OLS regression, random effects, and instrumental variable models to investigate the impact of surveillance on political imprisonment. I find that higher shares of spies per monitored individual are associated with a reduction of political imprisonment. Further, increasing levels of spy infiltration are linked to a systematic shift to silent forms of repression. The results suggest that comprehensive information on dissident identities are no precondition for repression in autocratic states.