Lorenzo Vicari

How do bureaucratic incentives shape policy implementation in autocratic regimes? Most explanations relate higher bureaucratic output to the preferences of partisans or to the competence of non-partisan agents. This paper argues that forceful implementation of sensitive policies can be driven by non-partisan bureaucrats who need to signal their alignment with the regime. We construct a formal signalling model to establish that, if revealing alignment through effort is sufficiently rewarded, non-partisans set higher effort than partisans due to their lack of credentials. We test this on a province-year dataset of all 415 provincial prefects in Fascist Italy (1922-40) by originally digitising their biographies and appointments, and linking them to the universe of about 100,000 political surveillance dossiers. We estimate a staggered Difference-in-Differences design, with prefects that voluntarily joined the Fascist Party, particularly before it seized power, as treatment: these partisans opened about 20 per cent fewer dossiers than non-partisan colleagues. We empirically probe several competing explanations, and we corroborate a signalling mechanism with further evidence: non-partisans disproportionately focus on the usual suspects to boost their reputation, and partisans obtain more job security per surveillance record, which our model shows is consistent with revealed alignment being rewarded. These findings provide rare systematic evidence on the functioning of authoritarian bureaucracies and show how signalling alignment can be a banal yet powerful driver of coercive behaviour.

This study investigates whether citizens of autocratic governments become more or less authoritarian when benefiting from successful development policies. Divergent theories provide divergent predictions: modernisation theory suggests that economic well-being fosters demands for democratisation, while retrospective gratitude may bolster autocratic legitimacy. Additionally, autocrats often can facilitate positive responsibility attribution by relying on propaganda. To explore the question, this study leverages the Battle for Wheat, fascist Italy’s cornerstone agricultural policy, which rapidly and substantially increased wheat yields throughout the country in the late 1920s. Employing an instrumental variable approach based on soil productivity changes from low to intermediate inputs, findings reveal that higher wheat yields led to increased support for the neo-fascist party MSI post-WWII, persisting for three to five decades despite democratization efforts. Heterogeneity based on radio signal strength, interpreted as a quasi-exogenous proxy for propaganda intensity, shows that the lingering support is concentrated in areas most heavily exposed to fascist media. In these same areas, more evidence of collective memory is indicated by street names and monuments glorifying the regime. However, an analysis of public opinion polling suggests that development outcomes are positively correlated with long-term democratic preferences and that, while neo-fascist voters generally display more authoritarian preferences, they do to a lesser extent in the locations most benefited by the policy. Overall, voters who likely associated themselves with neo-fascist parties due to lived or inherited policy benefits seem to harbour less anti-democratic tendencies. Operating distinctions based on the narratives that lead voters to autocratic parties is crucial to understanding their success and long-term persistence.

This paper studies industrial policy conducted by state equity participation, focusing on industrial development in postwar Italy (1945-73). It leverages a panel of more than 30 thousand joint-stock firms, covering more than 90% of the universe's total equity. Firms are linked to ownership information from the three main state holdings: at peak, state-participated firms accounted for over 20% of total assets in the database. I examine the firm- and sector-level consequences of state acquisitions on balance sheet indicators. Preliminary results of complementary Difference-in-differences models show that state participation increases firm assets and equity, but has heterogeneous effects on profitability, depending on pre-acquisition performance. Importantly, sector-level estimates show positive spillovers onto privately owned firms, consistent with state investment acting as a coordination device for private capital.

Autocrats have two main ways of ensuring citizens comply with their objectives: persuading them through propaganda or controlling them through repression. Most choose a blend of the two. However, theoretical expectations on the interplay of these two options vary and empirical evidence is rare. The case of Fascist Italy offers a chance of estimating such dynamics. I leverage the staggered rollout of radio infrastructure and I reconstruct AM signal strength using recently published technical routines and ground conductivity variation. Importantly, the impact of conductivity started being understood in 1936, making signal strength plausibly exogenous to local conditions if controlling for the distance to the transmitter. I estimate the impact of improved radio reception, taken as a proxy for propaganda intensity, on georeferenced individual-level police activity data from 1922 to 1944. Preliminary results show that increased propaganda lowers the amount of realised repression: heterogeneous effects suggest this impacts chiefly working-class, less politically involved individuals, potentially more sensitive to regime persuasion.

Autocrats need to simultaneously ensure the continued support of regime loyalists and stave off revolutionary threats by opponents. Who will they privilege when apportioning economic development? Preliminary results from municipal-level historical data on fascist Italy's flagship agricultural development policy suggest ex-ante politically opposed locations received more resources when they credibly threatened collective action. Decomposing policy outcomes based on geo-morphological characteristics allows the study to focus on the socio-economic component of yield improvements. I then exploit exogenous variation in agricultural strikes due to anomalous rainfall to causally connect unrest to larger productivity gains. The case suggests that local revolts against autocrats deliver important information on the misalignment of communities with regime objectives, which the ruling elite attempts to redress through targeted policies.

This study proposes a rationale for media bias based on incumbents' strategic provision of news to politically neutral media outlets. In the model, the politician holds newsworthy information by having direct access to government activities. Media outlets are interested in publishing news to increase their readership and reputation. The incumbent strategically provides it, asking for lenient coverage of bad news, such as scandals or policy blunders, in exchange. As a result, forgoing some of its reputation, the media withholds bad news when it detects it. Thus, a perfectly Bayesian representative voter — who receives the news report anticipating the possibility of this cooperation — is still more likely to re-elect the incumbent. This access journalism dynamic creates supply-side media bias without ideological preferences or media capture, but simply due to market incentives. Moreover, the model highlights how concerns around reputation lead the media to be more lenient towards high-prior incumbents. This dynamic inflates the difference in the likelihood of observing scandals by bad incumbents relative to good incumbents beyond their differences in expected congruence, substantiating their claims of media crookedness.