Examining other cases from around the world suggests that the arguments advanced in this book travel to a wide range of authoritarian regimes. The cases in previous chapters included a single-party regime (Taiwan), two military regimes (South Korea), and a personalist dictatorship (the Philippines). The shadow cases that follow below cover an equally wide cross-section of regime types, and span multiple regions of the world: Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. The cases have been selected on the basis of data availability and to test the generalizability of the book's arguments across regime type and geographic location; they should be considered a plausibility probe of the theory's external validity. Each of the three cases that follow demonstrates patterns of coercive institutional construction and state violence that are consistent with the arguments advanced in Chapter 2.

Where the dominant perceived threat is one of a coup, autocrats create fragmented and socially exclusive coercive institutions, as Saddam Hussein in Iraq did. These internal security agencies have social and professional incentives to engage in violence against the population, and lack the intelligence capacity to use discriminate and pre-emptive repressive alternatives. State violence is therefore high. Where the dominant perceived threat is one of mass unrest rather than elite overthrow, however, as it was in East Germany in the mid-1950s and Chile by the late 1970s, the coercive apparatus becomes unitary and more inclusive, and the use of violent repression decreases. These cases reveal strong correlations between the dominant perceived threat, coercive institutional type, and patterns of state violence that are consistent with the arguments made in earlier chapters of this book.

CHILE UNDER PINOCHET

After Salvador Allende was overthrown in a coup d'etat on September 11, 1973, Chile was ruled by a military government headed by Army General Augusto Pinochet, who was proclaimed President in 1974. The junta is infamous for its use of high levels of state violence during the first years of its rule, but experienced a dramatic decrease in state violence between 1973 and 1977. Over 1,800 people were killed in 1973, but after 1977, the number of deaths hovered around 100 per year. The number of people arrested and imprisoned similarly decreased. This drop is depicted in Figure 9.1.