Lina Skoglund

How does control over information shape the outcome of an autocratic transition? This paper studies a well-known strategy of autocrats in times of political instability: cutting off horizontal communications between civilians while saturating vertical communication channels with propaganda in the context of a coup against a democratic regime. More specifically, it explores the role of vertical broadcasts from the capital in preventing the coordination of pro-democracy citizens while securing the realignment of state agents. Based on Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup in December 1851 that caused the breakdown of the Second Republic (1848-1852), I study the effect of delays in telegraphic communications between Paris and the départements on the dynamics of local pro-democracy protests in a context characterized by near absolute censorship. I collected and digitized the full record of telegraphic dispatches exchanged between the capital and the rest of France during the coup. This rich dataset allows an examination of the effects of vertical information flows on mobilization and realignment. I model the stream of official communications during the coup through a simulation, and find that when the coup-plotters controlled information flows in and out of the capital, they could prevent the rise of pro-democracy dissent and clear the path towards autocracy. By contrast, when communications with Paris were less reliable and updates less frequent, I show that anti-coup mobilization was more likely and I provide descriptive evidence that local bureaucrats tended to be slower to realign with the new authoritarian regime.

This paper examines the role of surveillance in the establishment and consolidation of authoritarian regimes, with a focus on the emergence of modern policing under Joseph Fouché, Napoleon’s notorious Minister of Police. The political police play a dual role in the survival of authoritarian rule: they monitor weak signals to preempt emerging threats, and cultivate an illusion of omnipresence that disciplines behavior. This study emphasizes a third, often overlooked function critical to regime consolidation: cooptation. By turning potential dissidents into informants—often in exchange for leniency—the regime extends its reach and gradually dismantles opposition from within. Drawing on a unique archive of daily police reports from 1804 to 1810, the article highlights how blackmailing dissidents into acting as snitches of the regime is key in the transition towards autocracy. Using supervised and unsupervised language models on nearly 20,000 reported events in the police files, the study examines the strategic expansion of information networks and reveals how infiltration is a key instrument of regime transition.

What explains variations in the intensity of rural resistance to state intervention? This paper shows that backlash to state-led agrarian modernization projects can result from the interests and strategies of local landed elites. This study is based on the afforestation of the Landes de Gascogne, a large-scale development project initiated by the French state in 1857 to increase land productivity through the development of a pine monoculture on former common marshlands in the South-West of France. During the American Civil War (1861–1865), the region experienced a speculative boom as the new forests became a major source of turpentine, followed by a sharp price collapse with the resumption of U.S. exports. I show that where land was acquired by urban investors, landless classes actively resisted the environmental and economic transformation through recurrent and destructive arson attacks on plantations, illegally reclaiming land to restore pastoral land-use. By contrast, where local elites appropriated the commons, they entered into informal bargains with the rural poor to insure their forests against arson and maintained pre-capitalist norms of subsistence. In practice, they adjusted the enforcement of private property and tolerated noncompliance with pine monoculture, actively coordinating against state intervention to preserve their capacity to act as local brokers in order to protect their investments. Importantly, uniform state repression against arson would have homogenized fire risk across landowners. I provide qualitative evidence showing that local landowners actively lobbied for decentralization and local rule to shield their own investments while leaving urban investors exposed to fire risk, effectively fending off competition from outsiders and weaponizing the "weapons of the weak" to consolidate their own dominant position. The analysis combines commune-level data on land ownership and forest fires with qualitative evidence from surveys and petitions drawn from archival sources collected from French departmental archives.

How do new regimes select bureaucrats? After a coup or revolution, a new regime must allocate civil servant positions to build a bureaucracy that is both competent and loyal. However, post-transition, the ruler faces a dilemma: administrative experience is concentrated among incumbent bureaucrats of the previous regime, whose willingness to subordinate to the new ruler is unknown, while the new regime’s supporters exhibit maximal loyalty but usually possess minimal administrative experience. I argue that the size of the supporter base who participated to the transition and the type of transition determine the scope and patterns of bureaucratic turnover. Using a comprehensive dataset of all individual prefect appointments across nineteenth-century France - a period characterized by frequent, sudden and radical political upheavals - I show that broad democratic transitions produce sweeping purges driven by intra-party competition, resulting in less experienced and unstable bureaucracies. In contract, narrow autocratic takeovers favor selective cooptation of elites of the previous regime (girouettes opportunists). Crucially, I provide evidence that bureaucracies dominated by opportunists moderated autocratic regimes' partisan impulses, prioritizing administrative performance over factional loyalty and preventing complete capture of the state by the ruler's inner circle. These findings help solve a historical puzzle: how did France achieve steady state consolidation despite relentless political instability? I argue that the answer lies in bureaucratic continuity amid political ruptures. While regimes rose and fell, the centralized prefectoral system established in 1800 remained intact, creating durable career incentives for elites to realign across transitions. Opportunism powered French state development. Regimes collapsed, but elites survived, and, in surviving, they provided the foundations of the modern bureaucratic state.

How does the geographic divide between the winners and losers of environmental policies affect backlash? Using a natural experiment based on wildlife policies protecting large carnivores in France since the mid-1990s, this study explores how the geographic scope of programs targeting wolves and bears influences political mobilization. At the micro-level, the analysis suggests that exposure to both policies leads to higher voter turnout in local elections at the municipal level, though no single party appears to benefit from this increase in participation. At the macro-level, the findings show that the geographic spread of each species led to different forms of resistance. Due to biological habitat-preferences, bears remain within a fixed mountainous area, while wolves colonize new territories. I show that the anti-bear movement has become much stronger and sustained than the anti-wolf movement. In contrast, at the national level, members of parliament have generally supported new bear releases while opposing wolf protection efforts. Since direct and indirect costs of both policies were generously compensated, the study highlights that symbolic costs—such as perceptions of relative deprivation—play a crucial role in explaining the backlash to environmental policies with localized impact.