Watch the Company You Keep: Elite Networks and Political Repression

Manuel Vogt (University College London) gives his seminar as part of the CONNECT Seminar Series for the 2024-2025 academic year, with the main discussant being Andrea Knapp, a PhD researcher in the Department of Political and Social Sciences.

Seminar Abstract

Targeted repression of political elites is rife in countries across the globe, but individuals’ fates within such repressive regimes vary greatly. Why are some elite individuals more likely to suffer political repression than others? I extend existing arguments that focus on individual attributes by theorizing how collective identity and individuals’ political networks shape rogue rulers’ threat perception, which in turn influences the latter’s resort to different forms of repression. Empirically, I leverage original data on the pre-independence political elite of 18 African countries to evaluate the effects of individual elites’ pre-independence political networks, as well as the post-independence political status of their ethnic groups, on their risk of different forms of political persecution following independence. I find that elite individuals from politically excluded ethnic groups are over twice as likely as individuals from ruling groups to suffer repression whereas trans-ethnic connections reduce the risk of repression. Moreover, deadly repression mostly affects individuals with high degrees of cliquishness. I also present evidence for the effect of generational proximity on elite individuals’ network connections.

Speaker's Short Bio

Manuel Vogt is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, School of Public Policy, at UCL. He is also an affiliated researcher in the R4D project “Ethnic Power Relations and Conflict in Fragile States,” funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). He received his PhD in political science from ETH Zürich and was subsequently a visiting postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. Previously, he spent two months as a visiting researcher at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar in Quito, Ecuador, and two terms as an Amity Institute intern at Hamline University in St. Paul, MN. Apart from his academic work, he worked as a German language teacher for adult immigrants in Switzerland for over ten years and volunteered as a social worker in an institution for street children in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, from 2008 to 2009. For more than fifteen years, he has been traveling extensively throughout the world, but most enthusiastically in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.