by: Barbara Piotrowska and Monika Nalepa
| After regime breakdown, fledgeling democracies need to deal with the legacy of violence. In some countries, such as Poland, this process included “verification”, a screening of the agents of the repression apparatus to identify those that could apply to work in the new democratic security services. However, a form of self-screening and selection out of security services had already started pre-transition. Secret police officers were trained to know the condition the state was in, observing and reporting on the “mood” in the society. Hence, they were among the first to see the writing on the wall and take advantage of more lucrative job opportunities. On the other hand, officers had conjectures about what aspects of their pasts might prevent them from being positively verified and may have refrained from verification altogether. Our formal model of auto-verification incorporates both kinds of considerations to understand their effects on the composition of the pool of security agents who remained in security services post transition. We test the model predictions using individual-level employment data from the Polish communist secret police, Służba Bezpieczeństwa. |
Authoritarian Political Systems Group 