Replication Data for: The Strategic Shuffle: Ethnic Geography, the Internal Security Apparatus, and Elections in Kenya

For autocrats facing elections, officers in the internal security apparatus play a crucial role by engaging in coercion on behalf of the incumbent. Yet reliance on these officers introduces a principal-agent problem: officers can shirk from the autocrat's demands. To solve this problem, autocrats strategically post officers to different areas based on an area's importance to the election and the expected loyalty of an officer, which is a function of the officer's expected benefits from the president winning re-election. Using a dataset of 8,000 local security appointments within Kenya in the 1990s, one of the first of its kind for any autocracy, I find that the president's co-ethnic officers were sent to, and the opposition's co-ethnic officers were kept away from, swing areas. This paper demonstrates one way in which authoritarian state institutions can persist despite the introduction of multi-party elections and prevent full democratization.