Political Repression. Linda Camp Keith

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      DOMESTIC THREATS AND OPPOSITION

      Theoretically, the most significant environmental factor in state repression may be the presence of significant domestic opposition or a perceived challenge to the regime’s hold on power, especially if there is a threat (actual or perceived) that the regime’s challengers may resort to violent tactics. The regime may choose to employ coercive force to prevent, contain, or punish such threats. The most potentially disruptive form of domestic threat, civil war, has received the most empirical attention, and its effect has been demonstrated to be the strongest of many factors, in terms of impact, statistical robustness, and consistency across a variety of measures of repression and other human rights behavior (for example, Poe and Tate 1994; Davenport 1995c; Cingranelli and Richards 1999a; Keith 1999, 2002a, 2004; Richards 1999; Poe, Tate, and Keith 1999; Apodaca 2001; Regan and Henderson 2002; Davenport and Armstrong 2004; Keith and Poe 2004; Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2005; Abouhard and Cingranelli 2006). To illustrate its magnitude, Poe, Tate, and Keith (1999) demonstrate that an ongoing civil war would increase the level of repression over time by around 1.5 on a 5-point scale of repression, with other factors in the model held equal (308).

      Political scientists have also sought to understand the impact of less severe forms of threat, as well as other dimensions of threat, such as variety of strategies and frequency of conflict. Davenport (1995c) found that deviance from past norms of conflict, the frequency of conflict, and the variety of strategies engaged each increases the likelihood that a state will resort to civil liberties restrictions; however, once these factors are controlled, the presence of domestic violence becomes statistically insignificant. As Davenport notes, “the insignificance of this variable is probably attributed to the fact that its presence generally leads to the implementation of other tools of behavioral control including state-sponsored terrorism, armed attacks and political executions” (701). Davenport (1999) confirmed these findings generally, but also found that the presence of domestic violence decreased the odds of negative sanctions. I further test Davenport’s supposition that this negative effect is likely because the regime engages in different forms of repression when violence is present, especially since the empirical literature on personal integrity rights has consistently demonstrated this expectation.

      Poe et al. (2000) found that the repressive response to domestic threats was dependent not only upon the level of the threat but also upon the prior level of repression. Generally the greater the level of the threat, the more likely a regime was to engage in coercive force, although some regimes did in fact engage in repression even when they were not seriously threatened. However, where repression levels were already high, nonviolent protest and nonviolent rebellion had little or no effect, but these threats did have some effect on repression in states that had exercised only low to moderate levels of repression in the past. On the other hand, violent opposition or rebellion increased the level of repression regardless of the prior level of repression, unless repression was already quite high. The analyses also showed that regimes responded in most cases by lessening the repression once the threat ceased; this result suggests that regimes do weigh the potential cost of engaging in political repression, perhaps in fear of their supporters’ defecting if repression continues once the threat diminishes or perhaps in response to the economic costs in terms of resources or the loss of support of international actors (Poe et al. 2000, 58). Regan and Henderson (2002) also found that the level of threat was positively associated with repression, and that the impact of threat was greater than that of regime type. They also found that when controlling for threat, less-developed states with intermediate levels of democracy had the greatest odds of using coercive force. Political scientists now have multiple measures capturing a fuller range of repressive tools that regimes have at their disposal, as well as multiple measures capturing the most significant dimensions of threat. In Chapter 6 I examine more fully the theoretical expectations in regard to both internal and external threats, as well as formal regulations of regime behavior during times of threat.

      REGIME CHARACTERISTICS

      Democracy: As I noted above, political democracy has proven to be one of the more potent and consistent explanators in political repression models; almost four decades of research support the expectation that higher levels of democracy are associated with lower levels of repression, across both categories of repression (for example, Hibbs 1973; Ziegenhagen 1986; Mitchell and McCormick 1988; Henderson 1991; Poe and Tate 1994; Davenport 1995c, 1999, 2007a; Poe, Tate, and Keith 1999; Richards 1999; Zanger 2000; Apodaca 2001; Keith 2002a; Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2005). As discussed above, more recent studies of democracy’s influence on repression have urged us to look beyond a simple linear relationship and have indeed demonstrated that the relationship is not as simple as we have generally theorized. Gartner and Regan (1996) and Regan and Henderson (2002) demonstrated that the impact of democracy on human rights abuse is curvilinear when controlling for the level of threat, with semi-democracies more likely to repress than full democracies and autocracies. Their work was, however, limited to only less-developed countries.

      Davenport and Armstrong (2004) demonstrate that we have probably misspecified democracy’s role in our models, specifically showing that democratization tends to have no impact until it reaches a critical threshold. Using the Polity measure of democracy, they find that at the lower levels of the scale (below 8) there is no impact, but as states progress into the intermediate level there is some negative effect on repression, and as states reach the highest level of democracy there is a strong negative effect (548). Other scholars have perceived democracy as a multidimensional concept and have sought to understand which dimensions of democracy are more likely to lessen the use of political repression (Gleditsch and Ward 1997; Keith 2002a; Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2005). Gleditsch and Ward (1997) examined empirically the components of the Polity measure and demonstrated that the measure is primarily driven by its executive constraint dimension and that the other dimensions, which measure patterns of executive recruitment and the extent and competitiveness of participation, were “not especially powerful in determining the degree of democracy” (380). They conclude that to use the data “summarily to classify modern polities as democracies directs attention away from the actual data that have been collected on authority patterns” (380). Thus, they urged scholars to move beyond discrete classification of “democracy” or “autocracy” and to focus more on the sub-dimensions of this measure. Studies of political repression do not use the Polity data as a dependent variable, nor do we typically use the data to divide countries into two discrete categories; rather, we use the index to control for the level of institutional democracy attained in the country.

      Nonetheless, Keith (2002a) followed Gleditsch and Ward’s suggestion and tested the four components of the Polity democracy measure separately; two of the components produced statistically significant relationships: constraint on the chief executive and the competitiveness of political participation. While Ward and Gleditsch’s analysis revealed that the Polity democracy measure was largely driven by executive constraint, Keith found the competitiveness of political participation to be a more powerful explanator. Not surprisingly, the combined maximum impact of the two individual components was approximately equal to that achieved by the composite measure. Regardless of the construction of the democracy measure, its impact was one of the largest in the analysis. Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2005) confirmed this result, and also demonstrated that improvement of the state’s level of democracy did not make a difference in human rights until the state achieved full democracy, supporting Davenport and Armstrong’s analysis. Additionally, they demonstrated that the significant components of democracy had a sharp threshold effect, and they concluded that “real improvements in human rights do not occur smoothly but reflect a discontinuous step function achieved only when a society becomes fully democratic” (453). Ultimately, they concluded that accountability through a competitive party system is a critical feature of democracy, but for it to be effective in reducing human rights abuses, institutional foundations must first be put into place. In Chapter 3 I engage in a thorough examination of democracy, its various components, and effects.

      Types СКАЧАТЬ