Mass Purges: Top-Down Accountability in Autocracy
@article{Montagnes2019MassPT, title={Mass Purges: Top-Down Accountability in Autocracy}, author={B. Pablo Montagnes and Stephane Wolton}, journal={American Political Science Review}, year={2019}, volume={113}, pages={1045 - 1059} }
This paper proposes a novel theoretical framework to study the features of mass purges in authoritarian regimes. We contend that mass purges are an instrument of top-down accountability meant to motivate and screen a multitude of agents (e.g., single-party members, state bureaucrats). We show that the set of purged agents is well delineated in mild purges, whereas no performance indicator is a guarantee of safety in violent purges. The proportion of purged agents is non-monotonic in the…
One Citation
The Impact of Political Purge on Political Decisionmaking: Political Selection Under Extreme Uncertainty
- Political ScienceSSRN Electronic Journal
- 2019
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