Feather-handed fascists

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This session of the Political Behaviour Colloquium features a presentation by Pau Grau-Vilalta, PhD researcher at EUI

How do authoritarian rulers enforce compliance amongst bureaucrats appointed by previous regimes? Most explanations relate bureaucratic output to ideological alignment or expertise. This paper argues that it can be mainly driven by bureaucrats who need to signal their loyalty to the regime. We compile a province–year dataset for Fascist Italy (1922–40), originally digitising biographies and appointments of all 415 provincial prefects. We then link them to the universe of about 100,000 individual state surveillance dossiers. We exploit prefect mobility to estimate a staggered Difference-in-Differences design, with prefects that voluntarily joined the Fascist Party, particularly before it seized power, as treatment. The bureaucrats with this credible loyalty marker opened about 20 per cent fewer dossiers than career-appointed counterparts. After testing multiple alternative explanations, including competence and preferential deployment, we highlight that bureaucrats who were able to signal loyalty through party membership achieved comparable job security with lower surveillance and focused less on ``usual suspects", relative to career-appointed colleagues. The pattern aligns with loyalty-signalling motives: careerists, starting from lower loyalty priors, must work harder to secure their positions. These findings provide rare systematic evidence of authoritarian surveillance and show how career concerns, rather than ideology or competence alone, can be powerful drivers of coercive behaviour.

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