Dictators depend on a committed bureaucracy to implement their policy preferences. But how do they induce loyalty and effort within their civil service? The authors study indoctrination through forced military service as a cost-effective strategy for achieving this goal. Conscription allows the regime to expose recruits, including future civil servants, to intense “political training” in a controlled environment, which should improve system engagement. To test this hypothesis, the authors analyze archival data on over 370,000 cadres from the former German Democratic Republic. Exploiting the introduction of mandatory service in the gdr in 1962 for causal identification, they find a positive effect of conscription on bureaucrats’ system engagement. Additional analyses indicate that this effect likely did not result from deep norm internalization. Findings are more compatible with the idea that political training familiarized recruits with elite preferences, allowing them to behave strategically in accordance with the rules of the game.

中文翻译：

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独裁统治中灌输的部分效力

独裁者依靠坚定的官僚机构来实施他们的政策偏好。但他们如何在公务员队伍中引起忠诚和努力？作者研究了通过强制服兵役进行灌输作为实现这一目标的一种具有成本效益的策略。征兵允许该政权在受控环境中让新兵（包括未来的公务员）接受密集的“政治培训”，这应该会提高系统的参与度。为了验证这一假设，作者分析了来自前德意志民主共和国的 370,000 多名干部的档案数据。探索引入强制服务gdr在 1962 年的因果识别中，他们发现征兵对官僚系统的参与有积极的影响。其他分析表明，这种影响可能不是由深度规范内化引起的。研究结果更符合这样一种观点，即政治训练使新兵熟悉精英偏好，使他们能够根据游戏规则进行战略性行为。