Repression stops subjects from revealing what they think, so a ruler cannot tell how much support he has, and answers the uncertainty with more repression.
Wintrobe named it in 1990. The more effectively a regime punishes dissent, the more its citizens perform loyalty and the less its intelligence is worth. Rulers buy loyalty as well as fear to compensate, and still discover how little they had only when the crowd stops pretending, which is why autocracies look stable until the week they are not.
In practice
- A ministry reports that every target has been met, because no official has ever been rewarded for reporting a miss.
- A manager who shouts at bad news receives only good news, and is the last to learn the project is failing.
- Standing
- Compare preference falsification, which names the mechanism, and mushroom management, its corporate form.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works