Political Repression. Linda Camp Keith

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СКАЧАТЬ activities and/or beliefs perceived to be challenging to government personnel, practices or institutions” (2). Consensus among scholars dissipates somewhat when the focus narrows to the more specific nature of repression—in particular, whether repression should be conceptualized as being composed of a single dimension, or whether it is composed of multiple, distinct dimensions related to the form of coercion (for example, violence or coercion; see Stohl and Lopez 1984; Davenport 2007a), the breadth of the target (for example, actual dissenters or potential dissenters; see Wilkinson 1976), and the required resources, capabilities, and potential costs (see Mitchell and McCormick 1988; McCormick and Mitchell 1997). Most large-N cross-national studies of political repression have tended to focus on two forms of state repression separately—either addressing the more severe forms of repression, violations of personal integrity (imprisonment, torture, killing, and disappearances) (for example, Poe and Tate 1994; Poe, Tate, and Keith 1999; Cingranelli and Richards 1999a, 1999b; Keith 2002a; Keith, Tate, and Poe 2009), or addressing the broader category of civil liberties restrictions, or “negative sanctions,” as they are sometimes referred to in the literature (censoring the press, restricting freedom to assemble peacefully, or curbing religious freedoms) (for example, Davenport 1995a, 1995b, 2007a, 2007b; Keith 2002; Howard and Carey 2004; Walker and Poe 2002). The theoretical perspectives of the models employed in these studies are largely indistinguishable. Davenport (2007b) argues that while the two forms of repression share the same goal—to influence behavior and attitudes—they attempt to achieve the goal differently: civil liberties restrictions modify behavior through constraining and channeling opportunities; whereas personal integrity repression, such as killing and disappearances, modifies behavior through eliminating actors. Thus, it may be shortsighted to perceive repression as one-dimensional. However, as Davenport notes, to date most explanatory variables have similarly influenced both categories of repression, and therefore it is highly likely “that comparable processes underlie the coercive strategies” (487).

      Davenport’s (2007a) work makes a substantial contribution to the field in that he specifically explores the question of whether state-sponsored restrictions and state-sponsored violence are equivalent behaviors. While the literature clearly agrees that states’ primary objective in employing coercive methods is to maintain or achieve political order, Davenport distinguishes how states pursue this goal. He argues that when states choose to restrict their citizens’ freedoms, “their goal is less to remove individuals/groups from society than it is to mold them within it,” and thus restrictions “establish parameters within which individuals (victims as well as bystanders) modify their behavior in an attempt to avoid sanctions in the present and future” (47). He then posits that states have a different goal in employing violent tools of repression, specifically arguing that “killing citizens eliminates a part of society deemed unacceptable while compelling acquiescence or guided change in others” (47). Davenport posits that it is useful to consider combinations of strategies that regimes may employ to take advantage of different cost/benefit structures or to communicate different messages. He suggests four basic combinations that are theoretically illustrative, although he ultimately creates and tests nine categories. The four combinations include the two extremes on a continuum: on one end the government does not engage in restrictions or violence, and at the other end the government engages in significant levels of both restrictions and violence. In between, the government either engages in significant amounts of restrictions but not violence, or the government engages in significant amounts of violence but not restrictions. Davenport argues that each combination allows government authorities distinct sets of costs and benefits. For example, “restrictions without violence allow government officials to regulate behavior without provoking the negative ramifications associated with state-sponsored violence,” and “violence without restrictions allows authorities to eliminate challengers but avoids the administration, monitoring, and pretense of legality commonly affiliated with civil liberties restrictions” (49). Davenport’s empirical analysis reveals that some factors known to influence repression generally affect certain categories of repression in opposing directions. For example, conflict and development/modernization decrease the probability of a state’s resort to less lethal forms of repressive action, yet these same factors increase the probability of a resort to more lethal repression. He also demonstrates that democracy generally increases the probability that a regime will employ less lethal forms of repressive activity while decreasing the probability that it will employ more lethal methods. As I demonstrate in the measurement section below, I am not confident that the current measures of repression allow us to capture firmly the distinction between lethal and nonlethal dimensions.

      Davenport’s debate reflects an earlier debate among scholars who have examined personal integrity abuse and disputed whether this singular category of repression is itself multidimensional or unidimensional. Mitchell and McCormick (1988) have argued that the tools of repression within this subset are substantively distinct, and thus while “arbitrary political imprisonment was certainly reprehensible, resort to torture and killing was a distinct, and qualitatively worse, activity” (484). Poe and Tate (1994) disagreed, claiming that it could “be persuasively argued that the two dimensions postulated by Mitchell and McCormick stem, in reality, from the one dimension that Stohl and his colleagues tap [in their Political Terror Scale]—that both torture/killing and imprisonment are rooted in a regime’s willingness to repress its citizens when they are considered a threat” (855). McCormick and Mitchell (1997) disagree with Poe and Tate, contending instead that “human rights violations differ in type not just amount, such that they cannot be clearly represented on a single scale,” and in particular they argue that the use of imprisonment and the use of torture and killing are “quite different types of government activity, with differing consequences for the victims, differing use of governmental resources and capabilities, and differing costs for the government, both domestically and internationally” (514). They argue that governments or their agents engage in a calculation of costs and benefits when choosing among the tools of repression. However, their empirical analyses demonstrate only thin differences in predictor variables across two types of personal integrity abuse (imprisonment and torture). With one exception, the differences were tied to the level of achieved statistical significance, and most of these measures were ones that have performed thinly or inconsistently in other analyses that cover a longer period; McCormick and Mitchell’s analysis covers only the years 1984 and 1987. The one exception they find, civil war, has been one of the two predictors that have consistently achieved the highest level of statistical and substantive significance in personal integrity models, and civil war fails to achieve statistical significance in only one of the years the authors studied. Poe, Tate, and Keith (1999) note that the similarities Mitchell and McCormick find are “impressive given the differences in design: their use of two dimensions of repression as dependent variables, their not using a lagged dependent variable (as we had), and the necessity of their using smaller (cross-sectional) samples of countries [which] led to much larger standard errors in their reanalysis, making statistical significance more difficult to achieve, a factor that accounts for several of their divergent findings” (299). Poe, Tate, and Keith also raised theoretical concerns about analyzing the components of repression separately, because doing so does not take into account that the behaviors are substitutable policy options, and the fact that the choice to use one tool may either prevent or render unnecessary the use of the other (see Most and Starr 1989, 97–132). For example, killing one’s political opponents eliminates the need to imprison them. Disappearance may also be substitutable for imprisonment and may in many cases actually hide murder. I continue to conceptualize repression of personal integrity rights as a unidimensional phenomenon. As we will see below, Cingranelli and Richards’ (1999b) Mokken scaling of their nine-point physical integrity rights index strongly suggests that this subset of rights is indeed unidimensional.

      Measuring Repression

      Social scientists seeking to measure state repression or coercive action empirically face significant measurement issues similar to those that challenge all large-N cross-national studies. Mitchell et al. (1986) provide an accurate summary of the challenge: data sets must “(1) have broad coverage across countries and time, (2) be based on multiple sources, (3) be reliable and valid, (4) have intensiveness (depth of coverage), (5) have extensiveness of coverage (multiple indicators), and (6) be sensitive to differences across countries СКАЧАТЬ