Paper-Pusher or President’s Guard? State Work and Contentious Action in Syria’s Revolution

How does work for the state shape protest against authoritarian regimes? Autocrats can manipulate how both repressive and conventional state workers are selected, compensated and surveilled in ways that can strengthen their regime's hold on power. But because autocrats prioritize control of their repressive staff, we should expect employment in the repressive apparatus to more directly undermine protest occurrence. To examine this argument, I pair interviews with state personnel and new data on geolocated security installations with existing data on public employment and Syria’s 2011 protest movement. I show that high levels of public employment were associated with limited protest only in communities near security installations, where employees were more likely to be repressive staff especially unlikely to engage in or support local collective disobedience. Further from installations, high levels of public employment reflected civilian employment and were not associated with limited protest. The results point to a novel channel through which control of the repressive apparatus influences autocratic resilience to mass unrest and motivate further attention to when civilian employment generates compliance.