Krzys Krakowski publishes on the American Political Science Review
We congratulate Krzysztof Krakowski (Carlo Alberto Assistant Professor) on his paper “Does State Repression Spark Protest? Evidence from Secret Police Surveillance in Communist Poland“, which will appear in the American Political Science Review, one of the top and most established journals in political science.
In his paper, which is joint work with Anselm Hager, Krzysztof studies whether physical surveillance hinders or fosters antiregime resistance. There is a large literature in political science that holds that surveillance prevents resistance by providing regimes with high-quality intelligence on dissident networks and by instilling fear in citizens. Krzysztof and Anselm contrast this view using formerly classified data from Communist-era Poland.
They find that communities exposed to more surveillance officers were more likely to organize protests and confirm that this relationship is causal thanks to an “instrumental variable” methodological strategy. The study documents that, contrary to the regime’s intentions, Poland’s comprehensive use of surveillance created widespread anger as well as an incentive for citizens to reveal their true loyalties, thus facilitating antiregime collective action.
