Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Political Coercion and Cliometrics

  • Reference work entry
  • First Online:
Handbook of Cliometrics

  • 54 Accesses

Abstract

States can use various negative incentive schemes against non-state morality groups. When the strength of this pressure is sufficiently strong to be labeled malignant, these measures fall within the definition of political coercion surveyed in this chapter. The survey focuses on a selection of rational actor theories explaining the macro-level political coercion published in the last 20 years. We also refer to literature in adjacent fields aimed at creating an understanding of political coercion. Some of the theories explain outcomes that relate to the absence of political coercion, that is democracy, state-society balance, and liberty.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    For example, German citizens who grew up under a communist regime are more likely to be dishonest Ariely et al. (2019). In the study, participants with backgrounds from DDR report significantly higher results on a dice-rolling task producing to attain higher earnings Ariely et al. (2019). Another side of reducing the ability for collective action is the erosion of social trust through the use of informants to identify citizens criticizing the regime. The Stasi famously kept files on an estimated six million people and built up a network of civilian informants that monitored politically incorrect behavior among other citizens. This caused a vast amount of distrust among the population of the DDR that did not know who might report them or whether adverse career outcomes were due to a lack of performance, or, a lack of enthusiasm for socialism.

  2. 2.

    Note that a few eras of history are of particular interest to students of political coercion. In particular the authoritarian states of the twentieth century, the new economic history of the Soviet Union (Zhuravskaya et al. 2021), qualitative grand narratives of the twentieth century wars Ferguson (2012), quantitative analysis seeking the causes of the rise of Nazism (Galofré-Vilà et al. 2021) and surveys of classic literature on the rise of the Nazi regime Fritz (1987); Larsen et al. (1980). The early European modernity Johnson and Koyama (2019); Rubin (2017) would be of specific interest to students of political coercion. The Handbook of Cliometrics also has a chapter that is of particular interest in understanding political coercion – Mark Koyama’s chapter on “Political Economy” in this handbook.

  3. 3.

    Implicitly we assume personalities, ideologies, and ability to control are not the relevant factors driving coercion levels. This is, naturally usually a simplification. Since we are dealing with authoritarian regimes with no rule of law, the ante is high, which implies that getting fired is not the end of one career and perhaps the start of another, but a substantial risk that it is the end of your life. Simultaneously, this implies that the cost of disobeying is high but that once it is sufficiently likely that a cost will occur, the actions of the players can be drastic. The dictator must take this into account, which implies that the dynamics can differ substantially from the inner workings of organizations in law-governed free democracies. In formal models of politics, authoritarian regimes are covered in excellent recent surveys by Konstantin Sonin, who has a number of models on this (Egorov and Sonin 2020; Gehlbach et al. 2016), note also Mark Koyama and Desierto’s work on coalition formation in feudal states (Desierto and Koyama 2022). Autocrats’ personalities and ideologies differ; consider two emblematic twentieth century autocrats, Hitler and Stalin. Stalin was a workaholic, bureaucratic, micromanager Stalin while Hitler spontaneously made sudden changes and believed in competition between his subordinates. Hitler deliberately created overlapping areas of responsibility to foster competition between his subordinates (Kershaw and Lewin 1997). This type of inner dynamics is largely brushed over from the theoretical side, and evidence to support a given theory is thus valid to the degree that policies arise from the proposed factors and not the inner politics of the regimes.

  4. 4.

    Readers who are in the market for a precise method to sort a complex empirical reality by a more appropriate taxonomy referred to political science literature on political control (Hassan et al. 2022).

  5. 5.

    This definition is a simple rewrite of NATO’s definition of military deterrence which can be found at https://www.nato.int/docu/review/articles/2016/08/05/on-deterrence/index.html

  6. 6.

    For a proper introduction of the Gulag system consider Applebaum (2003) and Zhuravskaya et al. (2021).

  7. 7.

    To think of the behavioral side of this in a contemporary setting, consider striking up a conversation with a libertarian prime minister on the need to have some surveillance to limit domestic terrorism. Or, consider striking up a conversation with a Marxist leader on the need for individual economic freedom. Both would most likely consider your proposal a dangerous idea as it would respectively increase or decrease the influence of the state, which they respectively detest or love.

  8. 8.

    Perhaps, the fact that the Nazis did not wish for their Holocaust victims to change morality, as it was not open to them, is why they so openly documented their crimes against humanity. Nazism is one of the few essentially racist ideologies that did not seek to convert but rather enslave and destroy. For state moralities seeking to convert, coercion needs to be reasonably covert.

  9. 9.

    For an example of quantitative work consider the work of Freedom House Repucci and Slipowitz (2021). For a qualitative analysis of our contemporary times Shapiro (2019) argues convincingly in favor of trends that appear to indicate that democracy is deteriorating in the West in complex and perhaps intertwined ways along with conjectures of the historical patterns that have caused the successes and failures.

References

  • Acemoglu D, Robinson JA (2017) The Emergence of weak, despotic and inclusive states. Working paper 23657. National Bureau of Economic Research

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Acemoglu D, Robinson JA (2019) The narrow corridor: how nations struggle for liberty. Penguin UK

    Google Scholar 

  • Acemoglu D, Robinson JA (2023) Weak, despotic, or inclusive? How state type emerges from state versus civil society competition. Am Polit Sci Rev 117(2):407–420

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Acemoglu D, Wolitzky A (2014) Cycles of conflict: an economic model. Am Econ Rev 104(4):1350–1367

    Google Scholar 

  • Alesina A, Reich B, Riboni A (2020) Nation-building, nationalism, and wars. J Econ Growth 25(4):381–430

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Applebaum A (2003) Gulag: a history. Doubleday Books

    Google Scholar 

  • Arbatlı CE, Ashraf QH, Galor O, Klemp M (2020) Diversity and conflict. Econometrica 88(2):727–797

    Google Scholar 

  • Ariely D, Garcia-Rada X, Gödker K, Hornuf L, Mann H (2019) The impact of two different economic systems on dishonesty. Eur J Polit Econ 59:179–195

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ashraf Q, Galor O (2013) Genetic diversity and the origins of cultural fragmentation. Am Econ Rev 103(3):528–533

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Axelrod R, Conte R, Hegselmann R, Terna P (1997) Simulating social phenomena. Lecture notes in economics and mathematical systems. Springer, Berlin

    Google Scholar 

  • Besley TJ, Dann C, Persson T (2021) Pillars of prosperity: a ten-year update. CEPR Discussion Paper 16256, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Bhattacharya S, Deb J, Kundu T (2015) Mobility and conflict. Am Econ J Microecon 7(1):281–319

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bisin A, Verdier T (2001) The economics of cultural transmission and the dynamics of preferences. J Econ Theory 97(2):298–319

    Google Scholar 

  • Bisin A, Verdier T (2011) The economics of cultural transmission and socialization. Handbook of social economics. vol. 1. North-Holland, 339–416

    Google Scholar 

  • Bisin A, Verdier T (2023) On the joint evolution of culture and political institutions: elites and civil society. J Political Econ (forthcoming)

    Google Scholar 

  • Bisin A, Patacchini E, Verdier T, Zenou Y (2011) Formation and persistence of oppositional identities. Eur Econ Rev 55(8):1046–1071

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bostrom N (2019) The vulnerable world hypothesis. Global Pol 10(4):455–476

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Brennan J (2018) Democracy and freedom. In: The Oxford handbook of freedom. Oxford University Press, New York, p 335

    Google Scholar 

  • Burtsev M, Turchin P (2006) Evolution of cooperative strategies from first principles. Nature 440(7087):1041–1044

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cantoni D, Dittmar J, Yuchtman N (2018) Religious competition and reallocation: the political economy of secularization in the protestant reformation. Q J Econ 133(4):2037–2096

    Google Scholar 

  • Cantoni D, Yang DY, Yuchtman N, Jane Y, Zhang. (2019) Protests as strategic games: experimental evidence from Hong Kong’s antiauthoritarian movement. Q J Econ 134(2):1021–1077

    Google Scholar 

  • Carvalho J-P (2013) Veiling. Q J Econ 128(1):337–370

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carvalho J-P, Koyama M (2013) Resisting education. Technical report. University Library of Munich, Munich

    Google Scholar 

  • Carvalho J-P, Rubin J, Sacks M (2023) Failed secular revolutions: religious belief, competition, and extremism. Competition, and extremism (February 28, 2023)

    Google Scholar 

  • Chandra K (2004) Why ethnic parties succeed: patronage and ethnic head counts in India. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clark G (2004) Christianity and Roman society. Cambridge University Press

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Colagrossi M, Rossignoli D, Maggioni MA (2020) Does democracy cause growth? A meta-analysis (of 2000 regressions). Eur J Polit Econ 61:101824

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Conquest R (1970) The nation killers: the Soviet deportation of nationalities. Macmillan, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Conquest R (1997) Victims of Stalinism: a comment. Eur Asia Stud 49(7):1317–1319

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Conquest R (2018) The great terror: Stalin’s purge of the thirties. Random House

    Google Scholar 

  • Courtois S (1999) The black book of communism: crimes, terror, repression. Harvard University Press

    Google Scholar 

  • Desierto D, Koyama M (2022) Feudal political economy. Available at SSRN

    Google Scholar 

  • Dickson PGM (2017) The financial revolution in England: a study in the development of public credit, 1688–1756. Routledge

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Dippel C, Greif A, Trefler D (2020) Outside options, coercion, and wages: removing the sugar coating. Econ J 130(630):1678–1714

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Egorov G, Sonin K (2020) The political economics of non-democracy. Technical report. National Bureau of Economic Research

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Fearon, James D, Kimuli K, and David D, Laitin (2007) Ethnic minority rule and civil war onset american political science review 101(1):187–93.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ferguson N (2012) The war of the world: Twentieth-century conflict and the descent of the West. Penguin

    Google Scholar 

  • Fouka V (2017) How do immigrants respond to discrimination? The case of Germans in the US during World War I. Am Polit Sci Rev 113:1–18

    Google Scholar 

  • Fouka V (2022) Assimilation in historical political economy, in Jeffery A. Jenkins, and Jared Rubin (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Historical Political Economy (2024; online edn, Oxford Academic, 18 Aug. 2022). https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197618608.013.36

  • Fouka V (2023) Language policies in education and the possibility of identity backlash, in Nation-building: big lessons from successes and failures. CEPR E-book, edited by Dominic Rohner and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

    Google Scholar 

  • Fritz SG (1987) The NSDAP as Volkspartei? A look at the social basis of the Nazi voter. Hist Teach 20(3):379–399

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Froese P (2008) The plot to kill God: findings from the Soviet experiment in secularization. University of California Press

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Galeotti M, Galeotti M (1997) Yuri Andropov and the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev. In: Gorbachev and his revolution. St. Martin’s Press, New York, pp 19–36

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Galofré-Vilà G, Meissner CM, McKee M, Stuckler D (2021) Austerity and the rise of the Nazi Party. J Econ Hist 81(1):81–113

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Galor O, Klemp M (2017) Roots of autocracy. Technical report. National Bureau of Economic Research

    Google Scholar 

  • Gard-Murray AS, Bar-Yam Y (2015) Complexity and the limits of revolution: what will happen to the Arab Spring? In: Conflict and complexity: countering terrorism, insurgency, ethnic and regional violence. Springer, New York, pp 281–292

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Gehlbach S, Sonin K, Svolik MW (2016) Formal models of nondemocratic politics. Annu Rev Polit Sci 19:565–584

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gellner E (1989) Nations and nationalism, 1983. Basil Blackwell, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Gilley B (2009) The right to rule: how states win and lose legitimacy. Columbia University Press

    Google Scholar 

  • González-Dıaz J, Garcıa-Jurado I, Gloria M, Fiestras-Janeiro. (2010) An introductory course on mathematical game theory. In: Graduate studies in mathematics, vol 115. American Mathematical Society

    Google Scholar 

  • Greif A, Rubin J (2023) Endogenous political legitimacy: the Tudor Roots of England’s constitutional governance. J Hist Econ (forthcoming)

    Google Scholar 

  • Greif A, Rubin J (2024) Endogenous political legitimacy: the English Reformation and the Institutional Foundation of Limited Government. Unpublished manuscript

    Google Scholar 

  • Greif A, Tadelis S (2010) A theory of moral persistence: crypto-morality and political legitimacy. J Comp Econ 38(3):229–244

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Grigoriadis T (2016) Religious origins of democracy & dictatorship. J Policy Model 38(5):785–809

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Grigoriadis T (2018) Religion and comparative development: the genesis of democracy and dictatorship. Edward Elgar

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Grosjean P (2014) A history of violence: the culture of honor and homicide in the US South. J Eur Econ Assoc 12(5):1285–1316

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Guriev S, Treisman D (2019) Informational autocrats. J Econ Perspect 33(4):100–127

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Haber S, Menaldo VA (2011) Rainfall, human capital, and democracy. Available at SSRN 1667332

    Google Scholar 

  • Haber S, Elis R, Horrillo J (2021) The ecological origins of economic and political systems. Available at SSRN 3958073

    Google Scholar 

  • Hager A, Krakowski K (2022) Does state repression spark protests? Evidence from secret police surveillance in communist Poland. Am Polit Sci Rev 116(2):564–579

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Harber SH (2023) The rise and fall of the resource curse. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4558080. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4558080

  • Haidt J (2007) The new synthesis in moral psychology. Science 316(5827):998–1002

    Google Scholar 

  • Harari YN (2018) Why technology favors tyranny. The Atlantic 322(3):64–73

    Google Scholar 

  • Harff B (2017) No lessons learned from the Holocaust? Assessing risks of genocide and political mass murder since 1955. In: Genocide and human rights. Routledge, pp 329–345

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Harris S, Nawaz M (2015) Islam and the future of tolerance: a dialogue. Harvard University Press

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Harrison M (2002) Coercion, compliance, and the collapse of the Soviet command economy. Econ Hist Rev 55(3):397–433

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hassan M, Mattingly D, Nugent ER (2022) Political control. Annu Rev Polit Sci 25:155–174

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hegghammer T (2021) Resistance is futile: the war on terror supercharged state power. Foreign Aff 100:44

    Google Scholar 

  • Huemer M (2013) The problem of political authority. Springer

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Jacqueline HR (2016) The strategic use of state repression and political violence. In: Oxford research encyclopedia of politics. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Johnson ND, Koyama M (2019) Persecution & toleration: the long road to religious freedom. Cambridge University Press

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Kershaw I, Lewin M (1997) Stalinism and Nazism: dictatorships in comparison. Cambridge University Press

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Kimbrough EO, Laughren K, Sheremeta R (2020) War and conflict in economics: theories, applications, and recent trends. J Econ Behav Organ 178:998–1013

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kreps DM, Wilson R (1982) Reputation and imperfect information. J Econ Theory 27(2):253–279

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kuran T (1997) Private truths, public lies: the social consequences of preference falsification. Harvard University Press

    Google Scholar 

  • Laitin DD (1998) Identity in formation: the Russian-speaking populations in the near abroad, vol 22. Cambridge University Press

    Google Scholar 

  • Larsen SU, Hagtvet B, Myklebust JP (1980) Who were the fascists: social roots of European Fascism. Universitetsforlaget/Columbia University Press, Bergen/Irvington-on-Hudson

    Google Scholar 

  • Lichbach MI (1987) Deterrence or escalation? The puzzle of aggregate studies of repression and dissent. J Confl Resolut 31(2):266–297

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lichter A, Löffler M, Siegloch S (2021) The long-term costs of government surveillance: Insights from stasi spying in East Germany. J Eur Econ Assoc 19(2):741–789. https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvaa009

  • Machiavelli N (1993) The prince (1513). Wordsworth Editions, Hertfordshire

    Google Scholar 

  • Mearsheimer JJ (2018) The great delusion: liberal dreams and international realities. Yale University Press

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Mehlum H, Natvik GJJ, Torvik R (2021) The inefficient combination: competitive markets, free entry, and democracy. Centre for Applied Macro- and Petroleum economics (CAMP), BI Norwegian Business School

    Google Scholar 

  • Murphy SL, Kochanek KD, Xu J, Arias E (2021) Mortality in the United States, 2020. NCHS Data Brief (427):1–8

    Google Scholar 

  • Nazrullaeva E, Harrison M (2023) If you do not change your behavior: preventive repression in Lithuania under Soviet rule. University of Warwick

    Google Scholar 

  • North DC, Wallis JJ, Weingast BR (2009) Violence and social orders: a conceptual framework for interpreting recorded human history. Cambridge University Press

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Nozick R (1974) Anarchy, state, and utopia. Wiley

    Google Scholar 

  • O’Donnell G (2023) Bureaucratic authoritarianism: Argentina 1966–1973 in comparative perspective. University of California Press

    Google Scholar 

  • Pape RA (1996) Bombing to win: air power and coercion in war. Cornell University Press

    Google Scholar 

  • Piketty T (1995) Social mobility and redistributive politics. Q J Econ 110(3):551–584

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pinker S (2011) The better angels of our nature: the decline of violence in history and its causes. Penguin UK

    Google Scholar 

  • Rainer H, Siedler T (2009) Does democracy foster trust? J Comp Econ 37(2):251–269

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Reich D (2018) Who we are and how we got here: ancient DNA and the new science of the human past. Oxford University Press

    Google Scholar 

  • Repucci S, Slipowitz A (2021) Democracy in a year of crisis. J Democr 32(2):45–60

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rubin J (2014) Printing and protestants: an empirical test of the role of printing in the reformation. Rev Econ Stat 96(2):270–286

    Google Scholar 

  • Rubin J (2017) Rulers, religion, and riches: why the west got rich and the Middle East did not. Cambridge University Press

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Rummel RJ (2018) Death by government: genocide and mass murder since 1900. Routledge

    Google Scholar 

  • Saleh M, Tirole J (2021) Taxing identity: theory and evidence from early Islam. Econometrica 89(4):1881–1919

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sambanis N, Shayo M (2013) Social identification and ethnic conflict. Am Polit Sci Rev 107(02):294–325

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schelling TC (1958) The strategy of conflict. Prospectus for a reorientation of game theory. J Confl Resolut 2(3):203–264

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schøyen Ø (2021) What limits the efficacy of coercion? Cliometrica 15(2):267–318

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scott JC (2017) Against the grain: a deep history of the earliest states. Yale University Press

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Selten R (1978) The chain store paradox. Theor Decis 9(2):127–159

    Google Scholar 

  • Shapiro B (2019) The right side of history: how reason and moral purpose made the west great. Broadside Books

    Google Scholar 

  • Stalin J (1975) Marxism and the national question. New Book Centre

    Google Scholar 

  • Tilly C (2017) Coercion, capital, and European states, AD 990–1990. In: Collective violence, contentious politics, and social change. Routledge, pp 140–154

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Tomasello M (2016) A natural history of human morality. Harvard University Press

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Turchin P (2005) War and peace and war: the life cycles of imperial nations. Pi Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Turchin P (2023) End times: elites, counter-elites, and the path of political disintegration. Penguin

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilson PH (2009) The thirty years war: Europe’s tragedy. Harvard University Press

    Google Scholar 

  • Wintrobe R (1990) The tinpot and the totalitarian: an economic theory of dictatorship. Am Polit Sci Rev 84(3):849–872

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zhuravskaya E, Guriev S, Markevich A (2021) New Russian economic history. J Econ Lit (forthcoming)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Jean Pascal Bassino, Baard Borge, Derek John Clark, Theocharis Grigoriadis, Jared Rubin, David Ong, and Anton Weiss-Wendt for help with this project. I thank my PhD supervisors, Avner Greif and Bertil Tungodden, for their help on my PhD dissertation that this paper draws on. Further, I would also like to thank the Norwegian Centre for Holocaust and Minority Studies, The Hoover Archives, Hitotsubashi University, and the Stanford Department of Economics for their hospitality during parts of the work culminating with this survey. I am also grateful to Daniel Fabio Groth and Daniel Nikolai Johannessen for excellent research assistance as well as to the School of Business and Economics at UiT The Arctic University of Norway for funding and administration. Last but not least, this work is dedicated to the memory of all the victims of political coercion who paid the ultimate price for the callousness of a few and the folly and cowardliness of many. All errors in the manuscript are the responsibility of the author.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The School of Business and Economics, UiT The Artic University of Norway, UIT, Tromsø, Norway

    Øivind Schøyen

  2. FAIR Centre of Excellence, NHH Norwegian School of Economics, Bergen, Norway

    Øivind Schøyen

Authors
  1. Øivind Schøyen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. BETA/CNRS, University of Strasbourg, Institute for Advanced Study, Strasbourg, France

    Claude Diebolt

  2. University of Wisconsin – La Crosse, La Crosse, WI, USA

    Michael Haupert

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2024 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this entry

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this entry

Schøyen, Ø. (2024). Political Coercion and Cliometrics. In: Diebolt, C., Haupert, M. (eds) Handbook of Cliometrics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35583-7_82

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation