Résumé

Economic opportunities within a country are an important determinant of author-itarian repression. In this paper, we demonstrate theoretically and empirically thatcitizens’ economic opportunitiesabroadalso shape the repression levels within author-itarian regimes. We use a game-theoretic model to show that as citizens’ economicopportunities abroad expand, the number of political arrests increase since more cit-izens attempt to leave and the regime strengthens its repression policy. To test thishypothesis, we utilize data from Communist East Germany’s secret prisoner databasethat we reassembled based on archival material. Our identification strategy exploitsoccupation-specific differences in changing economic opportunities between East andWest Germany. We uncover causal evidence that economic opportunities in West Ger-many shaped politically-motivated arrests in East Germany. Using differential access toWest German television, we also shed light on the informational mechanism explainingour main result and discuss the external validity of our analysis.