🚨 New WP 🚨:
All states monitor the political activity of their citizens. But who do they choose to surveil, and why?
We study this question with the universe of Italian political surveillance files: 152,000 individuals born 1816–1932, across democracy and autocracy.
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Studying the logic of state surveillance based on the universe of Italian files finds that states target educated and subaltern groups, with mobilization and radical change potential, from Gemma Dipoppa and Annalisa Pezone
www.nber.org/papers/w34492
2/ 💡 We propose that states strategically target those combining capacity to mobilize with grievances for radical mobilization – educated but subaltern individuals perceived as most threatening to state stability.
This idea is rooted in descriptive data:
3/ Unsupervised LLM on 1,200+ police files shows that mobilization capacity – and a particular marker of it, education, – together with potential for subversion are recurring traits noted by the surveillance state. 📚
Nov 24, 2025 23:414/ 📃 📄 Descriptively, educated people were more likely to be watched. But education may proxy for background, status, or other fixed attributes.
We need a shock to education that affects otherwise similar people.
5/ 🎲 The shock:
The Casati Law mandated primary schooling for 2 years everywhere but extended it for +2 years in towns >4,000 inhabitants and cohorts born post 1854.
We show the reform reduced illiteracy and use it in a difference-in-discontinuity design by population and cohort.
6/ We present 3 results:
➡️ Result 1:
Municipality-cohorts exposed to more schooling were 64% more likely to be surveilled.
The effect increases as the state expands education and disappears when later reforms equalize schooling across municipalities.
7/ The effect persists even when individuals move elsewhere, in line with surveillance following a portable asset (education) rather than municipal-level changes.
8/ ➡️ Result 2:
Who faced the brunt of surveillance? The working class. The newly educated poor were watched longer, more harshly, and more intensively, consistently with the state fearing their empowerment.
9/ ➡️ Result 3:
Across 5 indicators of political activism—voting, protests, strikes, holding political roles, and armed resistance—educated cohorts did not become more engaged.
Surveillance expanded preventively, not in reaction to mobilization.
10/ Across democracy and dictatorship, and with more and less technology to collect data, the logic of surveillance was similar:
States target those combining political capacity (education) with radical grievances (subalternity).
11/
🎯 The takeaway:
States use surveillance as a preventive tool against the empowerment of educated but excluded groups.
👉 As excluded groups gain political empowerment, surveillance may reproduce inequalities by silencing them exactly as they gain political voice.
Feedbacks are most welcome!
Working paper 👉
www.nber.org/papers/w34492
Coauthor: Annalisa Pezone 🙌
sites.google.com/nyu.edu/anna...
The Logic of State Surveillance
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...
