Replication Data for: Political Competition and Authoritarian Repression: Evidence from Pinochet's Chile

Authoritarian regimes repress to prevent mass resistance to their rule. In doing so, regimes' security forces require information about the dissidents who mobilize such resistance. Political competition, which fuels partisan rivalries, offers one solution to this problem by motivating civilians to provide needed information to security forces. Yet civilians share information about any political opponents, not just dissidents, creating a challenge for regimes that wish to target dissidents. Drawing on novel archival data from the immediate aftermath of the 1973 military coup in Chile, a period with civilian collaboration with repression, this paper presents evidence that close pre-coup political competition is associated with more frequent repression and more targeting of non-dissidents. Using pre-coup democratic elections to measure political competition addresses the challenge of estimating political preferences unaffected by repression. Qualitative evidence and further quantitative tests probe implications of the partisan rivalry mechanism and account for alternative explanations.