Why ordinary people do dictators’ dirty work

As the deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) across the US faces scrutiny over its brutal practices, questions about how democracies slide toward repression are becoming increasingly urgent.

In his new book Making a Career in Dictatorship, Christian Gläßel, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for International Security at the Hertie School, explores a troubling insight: authoritarian regimes are not staffed primarily by fanatics, but by ordinary officials whose careers have stalled. 

We spoke with Gläßel about career pressures, coups, and what contemporary democracies should do to prevent meritocracy from becoming a weapon of repression.

Your book argues that career pressure, even more so than ideology or fanaticism, drives repression and coups. What made you realise that such “banal” motivations could explain some of the most extreme political violence?

Christian Gläßel: My co-author, Adam Scharpf (University of Copenhagen), and I had long been puzzled that historians and commentators on various authoritarian regimes often described high-ranking secret police agents as “mediocre”, “low-skilled”, or “uneducated”. 

We wondered: why would any dictator entrust an organisation they critically depend on to underachievers? We put ourselves in the shoes of the officers and asked under what circumstances individuals might be willing to carry out the dictator’s dirty work, hypothesising that unfulfilled ambitions and career pressure were the key factors.

After analysing data on over 4,000 Argentine army officers, the pattern was unmistakable: the worse an officer’s performance at the military academy, the sooner they faced mandatory retirement, and the more likely they were to join the secret police in hopes of demonstrating their loyalty and value. These weren’t ideological fanatics or psychopaths but individuals facing career dead-ends who saw repressive service as their ticket to professional redemption.

This connects directly to Hannah Arendt’s insight into the “banality of evil” and Christopher Browning’s work on “ordinary men”, but we go further. Arendt named the phenomenon and Browning documented it, but we identify the mechanism that produces it. Career pressure creates strong incentives for individuals to volunteer for the regime’s dirty work because they hope it will rescue their stalled careers. 

But here’s the twist: the same career pressure that drives some officers to do the regime’s dirty work drives others to join coups against it. Both are all-in gambles by people with their backs against the wall – one bets on the current regime, the other bets on its replacement. Both strategies can work, which is why the pattern recurs.

You draw on cases ranging from Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union to Argentina and The Gambia. Why was it important to ground your theory in historical examples, and what do these very different cases have in common?

Autocracies are inherently opaque. Dictators and their henchmen do not want to be studied. Such analysis usually becomes possible only after regime collapse, when individual-level evidence survives.

We deliberately chose cases that differ on almost every dimension, including ideology, geography, time period, and promotion system – precisely because we wanted to show that career pressure operates as a universal mechanism, independent of context.

Argentina provided the most fine-grained evidence because we could access detailed personnel records for the entire officer corps spanning a century. This allowed us to trace individual career trajectories and demonstrate systematically that career pressure motivated officers to join repressive units during the last military dictatorship and to participate in the two coups that toppled President Perón in 1955.

Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union allowed us to identify six distinct sources of career pressure that regimes can exploit: misconduct, wrong background, missing networks, organisational backlog, institutional shrinkage, and incompetence. The Nazi leadership exploited all six to staff the Einsatzgruppen, the regime’s paramilitary death squads. Stalin’s NKVD similarly staffed the Great Terror with officers who were losing the competition for promotions.

The Gambia offered a different angle: it shows how career pressure drives not just repression but also coups. When a small group of junior Gambian officers saw their careers blocked, they seized power in a 1994 coup, abolished the old promotion system, and ruled with an iron fist for two decades.

What unites these cases is the structural logic: hierarchical organisations inevitably produce winners and losers. The losers face a choice: accept career death or take extreme measures to salvage their future. 

You’ve applied your framework to institutions such as ICE. What warning signs should democracies monitor when career pressures, loyalty incentives, and weakened oversight converge?

In our commentary for DIE ZEIT, Adam and I drew on the book’s findings to explain the aggressive operations of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Unit (ICE). We identified three converging dynamics that should concern anyone watching American democracy.

The fuelling of career pressure. DOGE-driven purges and budget cuts across federal agencies have created a climate of fear. ICE is actively recruiting from a pool of officers who face uncertainty. 

Weakened oversight. The dismissal of 17 inspectors general removes key internal checks on misconduct, lowering the perceived risks of abusive behaviour. 

Signals of impunity for loyalists. Mass pardons, including for those involved in the January 6 insurrection, send a clear message that loyalists will be protected. 

These dynamics are reinforced by ICE’s recruitment practices: lowered standards, shortened training, large signing bonuses, and acceptance of candidates with criminal records. The broader lesson from our research is that repression does not require extremists; it requires only individuals whose alternatives have narrowed and whose careers depend on pleasing those in power.

The book claims that meritocratic, professional bureaucracies don’t necessarily protect democracy. What does your research tell us about the risks hidden inside “well-run” institutions?

This is perhaps our most counterintuitive finding, and it challenges a widespread assumption in both political science and policy discourse.

The conventional wisdom holds that professional, merit-based institutions serve as firewalls against authoritarianism. If promotions depend on competence rather than loyalty, the argument goes, you’ll get a bureaucracy committed to rules and procedures rather than to any particular leader.

Our findings tell a different story. The Argentine army maintained a remarkably meritocratic promotion system for over a century – through democracies, personalist dictatorships, and military juntas alike. Prussian military advisors established this system in the early 20th century, and it persisted regardless of who held power. Yet this same meritocratic institution produced both brutal repression and repeated coups.

The reason is structural: meritocracy by design creates losers. Any pyramid-shaped hierarchy with competitive promotions will generate a pool of officers who fall behind, who see their peers advance while they stagnate. These career-pressured individuals become a critical human resource for regimes seeking to turn a professional security organisation into a repressive machine – without provoking massive resistance or backlash. The underachievers do the dirty work, while the top performers can stay in their regular positions, untainted by direct involvement. This division of labour allows repression to proceed without alienating the institutional core.

The policy implication is sobering: professionalisation alone won’t protect democracy. We need to think carefully about what happens to those who lose in competitive systems and what pathways we offer them.

If career pressure can turn ordinary officials into enforcers of authoritarianism, how can policymakers, civil society, and democratic leaders use your findings to prevent abuse of power and strengthen democratic resilience?

Our research points to several intervention strategies. I’ll focus on three here: 

1. Closely monitor security forces, especially recruitment patterns. Lowered standards, rapid expansion, and targeting vulnerable workers are warning signs that warrant scrutiny by journalists, civil society and oversight bodies.
2. Create alternative career pathways. If career pressure fuels repression, offering exits, such as retraining, lateral transfers and civilian employment, can reduce incentives to comply with abuse.
3. Design more effective sanctions. Beyond top leaders, targeted sanctions against mid-level officers can reshape individual cost–benefit calculations.

Ultimately, the aim is to sever the link between career desperation and repression.