Mass Purges: Top-Down Accountability in Autocracy

This paper contends that mass purges are a salient method of top-down accountability used by totalitarian regimes to increase party performance and shape party membership. In our theoretical framework, party members work on independent projects. Their fate, however, is linked through the purge, and a member’s effort depends on the activism of all others via what we call the pool size effect. In turn, the autocrat’s incentive to purge depends on...