The Logic of State Surveillance

All states adopt systems to surveil political activists. How do they decide whom to watch and why? We study the logic of state surveillance using the first complete individual-level database of those monitored by a state — 152,000 Italians born between 1816 and 1932, encompassing both democratic and authoritarian regimes. We focus on education: exploiting a discontinuous expansion in primary schooling in municipalities above a population and age threshold, we show that cohorts exposed to more years of school experienced an uptick in surveillance. The effect is largest for working classes, who were monitored for longer periods, subjected to harsher measures, and disproportionately targeted when affiliated with communist ideologies. Yet treated cohorts did not become more politically active, indicating that surveillance expanded not in reaction to increased mobilization, but as a preventive strategy rooted in fears of working-class empowerment. These findings reveal how states view educated yet excluded groups as politically threatening and prioritize their surveillance, potentially generating inequalities in groups' ability to influence political change.