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Title: Modeling self-selection into vetting institutions: An application to purges in nascent democracies

Abstract: Political institutions often produce unintended consequences. Institutions intended to accomplish certain goals can modify incentives of actors in ways that make them depart from the goals the original designers had in mind. Can we use tools of formal modeling to detect when this is likely to happen? In this article, we illustrate such an approach. By combining a simple decision model (a naive reconstruction of an institution) with a costly signaling model, we show how social scientists can incorporate agents’ incentives into anticipating downstream effects of vetting institutions. To make our argument legible, we illustrate it with an application to police reform in the context of regime change. Throughout the manuscript, we use the running example of post-communist Poland, a country that faced the daunting challenge of having to reform its police apparatus after communism.