The Price of Collaboration: How Authoritarian States Retain Control

• Author: Barbara Maria Piotrowska
• Published date: 01 November 2020
• Date: 01 November 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0010414020912277
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414020912277

Comparative Political Studies

2020, Vol. 53(13) 2091 –2117

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0010414020912277

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Article

The Price of

Collaboration: How

Authoritarian States

Retain Control

Barbara Maria Piotrowska1

Abstract

How does access to foreign or independent media affect the operation of

a state security apparatus? This article answers this question concentrating

on two characteristics of the informant network of the East German Stasi:

the number of informants and their “price.” Exposure to West German

TV (WGTV) had the potential to decrease the supply of informants and

increase the demand for them, pushing up the value of the payments the

informants received, but leaving their quantity theoretically ambiguous.

I verify this reasoning using a rare original data set of Stasi informants.

Results show that informants were given approximately 70 East German

marks worth of rewards more per year in the areas that had access to

WGTV, as compared with areas with no reception—ironically an amount

roughly equivalent to the cost of an annual East German TV subscription.

These findings demonstrate how an authoritarian state can counteract the

potentially destabilizing effect of foreign media.

Keywords

nondemocratic regimes, covert repression, authoritarian survival, media in

authoritarian regimes

1Oxford University, Oxford, UK

Corresponding Author:

Barbara Maria Piotrowska, Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University, Radcliffe

Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6GG, UK.

Email: barbara.piotrowska@bsg.ox.ac.uk

912277CPSXXX10.1177/0010414020912277Comparative Political StudiesPiotrowska

research-article2020

2092 Comparative Political Studies 53(13)

Introduction

How does access to foreign or independent media affect the operation of a

state security apparatus? The literature on media in authoritarian regimes

concentrates on the impact that media, state-sponsored or independent, have

on citizens. Most studies find that the media can effectively change people’s

behavior (see, for example, Adena et al., 2015; Enikolopov et al., 2011, 2017;

Garcia-Arenas, 2016; Miner, 2015; Peisakhin & Rozenas, 2018). However,

in the important case of West German TV’s (WGTV) influence on protests in

the German Democratic Republic (GDR; 1949–1990), the empirical link is

far less well established (Crabtree et al., 2014; Grdešić, 2014; Kern, 2010).

This fact, combined with the historical importance and reputation of the

Stasi, the East German secret police, highlights a mechanism that the media

literature has so far overlooked: If access to nonstate media is easily predict-

able, authoritarian secret police may attempt to counteract any destabilizing

effect that such an information source might have. This paper shows that fac-

tors that affect citizen support for a regime, such as foreign media, simultane-

ously affect the repressive response of the state. As a result, a destabilizing

factor does not always affect state control negatively. The study presents a

framework to understand the simultaneous effects a destabilizing factor may

have on society and the state.

I analyze the operation of a state security apparatus by concentrating on

the Stasi informant network: the number of informants and the amount that

they were paid, two equilibrium quantities determined by the interaction of

the supply of informants and the demand for them. When WGTV releases

information that puts the regime’s performance into perspective, passive pop-

ular support decreases, and so does the willingness of existing informants to

continue their service. In my model, this decreases informant supply. At the

same time, the regime knows that WGTV has the potential to destabilize

society and hence needs the informants to control citizens. This is theoreti-

cally equivalent to an increase in demand for informants. Together, these two

shifts affect both the informant reservation wage and informant network den-

sity. In particular, the price paid to informants should unambiguously increase,

and the number of informants should change in line with the relative strength

of the two shifts and informant price elasticity.

I test the empirical implications of my theory using a rare original data set

of Stasi informants that was collected over a period of two years. The data

include information on rewards received by informants, allowing me to iso-

late the variation in price, as well as covariates. Moreover, an analytically

attractive feature of WGTV is that its reception varied across East Germany

in a plausibly exogeneous way, which facilitates inference about the