RT Article
T1 Denunciation and Social Control
JF American sociological review
VO 82
IS 2
SP 384
OP 406
A1 Bergemann, Patrick
LA English
YR 2017
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1560386738
AB It has long been observed that centralized social control requires some level of cooperation from the populace. Without such assistance, control agents are unable to acquire the local knowledge necessary to locate and prosecute deviants. Yet why citizens cooperate with authorities, especially in the most repressive regimes, remains a puzzle. This article develops two models of such cooperation: in the first, authorities actively use incentives to elicit denunciations from the populace, through either coercion or the promise of rewards. In the second, authorities passively gain access to local negative networks, as individuals denounce to harm others whom they dislike and to gain relative to them. Using internal variation in the early years of the Spanish Inquisition (1486 to 1502) and Romanov Russia (1613 to 1649), I demonstrate the differing effects of each model on patterns of denunciations. Paradoxically, social control is most effective when authorities provide individuals maximum freedom to direct its coercive power.
K1 Social control
K1 Denunciation
K1 Repression
K1 Sozialle Kontrolle
K1 Denunziation
DO 10.1177/0003122417694456