When the secret service can’t scare: informant recruitment in a reforming authoritarian regime

Secret services are an invisible but essential part of government. They rely significantly on informants for their operations and use coercion and persuasion as key inputs in informant recruitment. Whether the recruitment is coercion- or persuasion-intensive can depend on recruitee characteristics. Therefore, as implied by standard production theory, changes in the relative cost of these inputs can affect recruitee profiles. Using declassified Soviet era data, we explore how informant profiles changed as the relative cost of coercion increased, resulting in weaker coercive capacity. We find that the likelihood of recruiting younger, urban and more educated informants decreased. Further analysis of informants whose collaboration ended during the weaker coercion period shows that these groups were also more likely to end the collaboration themselves rather than for natural reasons. These results illustrate how changes in coercive capacity can alter the composition and stability of informant networks, with implications for the secret service’s operations such as the use of targeted versus mass repression.