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.威权政权通过实施镇压以防范民众对其统治的群体性反抗。在此过程中，政权的安全力量需要掌握发动此类反抗的异见者的相关信息。催生党派对立的政治竞争（political competition），为解决这一困境提供了一种可行路径：它能够激励平民向安全力量提供所需情报。但平民会举报所有政治对手，而非仅异见者，这给意图精准打击异见者的政权带来了新的挑战。本文依托1973年智利军事政变后不久的新型档案数据（novel archival data）——该时期存在平民配合镇压的协作现象——提供实证证据：政变前紧密的政治竞争与更频繁的镇压行动以及更多针对非异见者的打击存在显著关联。本文借助政变前的民主选举数据衡量政治竞争，解决了“估算未受镇压干扰的政治偏好”这一计量难题。定性证据与进一步的定量检验则对党派对立机制的相关推论进行了探究，并对替代性解释进行了回应与考量。