Feather-handed Fascists: Surveillance as a Signal of Bureaucratic Loyalty
How do bureaucrats' incentives shape surveillance in autocratic regimes? Most explanations relate bureaucratic output to ideological alignment or expertise. This paper shows that it can be mainly driven by bureaucrats who need to signal their loyalty to the regime. We compile a province–year dataset for Fascist Italy (1922–40) that links originally digitised biographies and appointments of all 415 provincial prefects to the universe of about 100,000 state surveillance dossiers, and we focus on the ones that voluntarily joined the Fascist Party, particularly before it seized power. We then estimate a Difference-in-Differences design exploiting prefect mobility. Prefects with this credible loyalty marker opened about 20 per cent fewer dossiers than career-appointed counterparts. After testing multiple alternative explanations, including competence and preferential deployment, we highlight that credible loyalists achieved comparable job security with lower surveillance and focused less on "usual suspects", relative to career-appointed colleagues. The pattern fits loyalty-signalling motives: careerists, starting from lower loyalty priors, must work harder to secure their positions. These findings provide rare systematic evidence on authoritarian surveillance and show how career concerns, rather than ideology or competence alone, can be powerful drivers of coercive behaviour.