Authoritarian Indoctrination through Selective Repression

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

In this seminar, Sergi Martínez, PhD researcher at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, will present the paper "Authoritarian Indoctrination through Selective Repression."

How does highly targeted authoritarian repression affect political behaviour? While coercion tends to backfire, in this paper, I hypothesise that focusing repression on opposition leaders might substantially diminish opposition movements’ human capital and limit their development. This is particularly relevant due to leaders’ high social status: liberal professionals, doctors, or civil servants frequently have such a role. Repressing them means purging the catalysers of alternative ideas, which ensures authoritarian regimes’ monopoly on narratives and socialisation processes. Thus, repressing civic leaders can provide a local indoctrination premium to authoritarian regimes. I examine this claim by combining digitalised records of individual trials executed by the Fascist war court during the Spanish civil war (1936-1939) in Galicia with original post-war archival data on political behaviour at the municipality level.

This paper employs a novel measure of exposure to targeted repression and traces its effects in authoritarian (1966-1974) and post-transition (1977-1996) elections. Results suggest that focusing repression on civic leaders enhances support for authoritarian policies and improves their successor parties’ performance in post-transition seminal elections. In line with the indoctrination hypotheses, repression on school teachers and professors emerges as the main effects’ driver. Connecting repression and indoctrination, two authoritarian tools previously treated as separate and complementary, is the main contribution of this paper.

The speaker will be presenting in person. Participants can follow the talk from Seminar room 2, although space is restricted to a maximum of 8 people on a first-come, first-served basis. The talk will also be live-streamed and participants will receive the zoom link once registered.