Political Repression. Linda Camp Keith
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formal acceptance.8 Throughout the book I use the terms “political repression” and “human rights abuse” and variations of these terms to identify the same behavior. I believe the usage is appropriate for the context of my study, and it allows some rhetorical freedom and variety. Ultimately, I agree with both Davenport’s definition of political repression, which he draws somewhat from Goldstein (1978), and with his assessment of the goals that state actors seek to achieve through the use of repression: “By most accounts, repression involves the actual or threatened use of physical sanctions against an individual or organization, within the territorial jurisdiction of the state, for the purpose of imposing a cost on the target as well as deterring specific activities and/or beliefs perceived to be challenging to government personnel, practices or institutions” (2). As Davenport notes in his review of the quantitative literature dedicated to the study of state repression, this work has been unified in its focus on the problem of order and has been “fundamentally concerned with why and how political authorities use coercive power domestically amid potential and existing challenges and challengers” (2007c, 1–2). Most cross-national studies of political repression have tended to focus on one of two dimensions of state repression, rarely on both—either addressing the more severe form of repressions, 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), or addressing the broader category of civil liberties restrictions or “negative sanctions” as they are sometimes referred to in the literature (for example, Davenport 1995a, 1995b, 2007a, 2007b; Keith 2002b; Howard and Carey 2004; Walker and Poe 2002). Davenport (2007b) argues that while the two forms of repression share the goal of attempting to influence behavior and attitudes, they achieve the goal differently; civil rights restrictions modify behavior through constraining and channeling opportunities, and personal integrity abuses such as killing and disappearances modify behavior through eliminating actors. Thus it may be shortsighted to perceive repression as one-dimensional. However, as Davenport notes, thus far most explanatory variables have similarly influenced both categories of repression, and therefore it is highly likely that “comparable processes underlie the coercive strategies” (487). While my previous work has largely fit within the first category of repression, in this book I examine both categories. And while, like Davenport, I do find both categories of repression similarly influenced by the same agentic and structural factors, significant differences emerge in regard to the influence of domestic and external threats, constitutional provisions, and, in some limited instances, the role of the judiciary.
Why Do States Repress Their Own Citizens?
While most of the current empirical work on political repression has approached states’ behavior from the perspective of international relations theory (primarily a “soft” rational-choice perspective), I seek to expand the theoretical underpinnings that encompass a broader set of subfields in political science, including public law and comparative politics. I do not expect to be able to offer an overarching grand theory that synthesizes the theoretical concerns of these subfields; however, I do believe that the dominant theories share features that may be incorporated under the “organizing concepts” of opportunity and willingness that Most and Starr set forth (1989), and which they argue appropriately encompass both macro and micro approaches (23). I believe the concepts are useful here for structuring the somewhat disparate approaches through which these diverse fields attempt to understand political repression or human rights abuse.
Most and Starr conceptualize opportunity as “a shorthand term for the possibilities that are available within any environment,” and which thus “represents the total set of environmental constraints and possibilities” (1989, 23). They conceptualize willingness as “a shorthand term for the choice (and the process of choice) that is related to the selection of some behavioral option from a range of alternatives” and the subsequent employment of “available capabilities to further some policy over others” (23). They derive their notion of these two overarching concepts from the work of the Sprouts (1956, 1965, 1968, and 1969), in particular from these authors’ conceptualization of the “ecological triad,” which is composed of an entity (with its policy/choice processes), its context or environment, and the relationship or interaction between the entity and the environment (27). According to Most and Starr, “The ultimate entities—single decisionmakers or small groups of decisionmakers—are surrounded by factors that structure the nature of the decision, the options available, the consequences, costs and benefits of those options. Individuals, then, make choices within a complex set of incentive structures. This can be captured only looking at all three parts of the ecological triad. Opportunity and willingness … encompasses all three aspects of the triad” (29). As Friedman and Starr (1997) note, the value of the framework is that “it highlights the notion that all independent variables explaining social phenomena can be characterized as either agentic or structural variables” (6). Most and Starr (1989) conceptualize interaction between agent/entity and structure/environment with the metaphor of a menu that provides “a number of behavioral choice/possibilities” that do not determine the diner/actor’s choice but that limit it (28). As Friedman and Starr note, “factors based in both the agent (values, preferences, resources, etc.) and the structure (prices, size of portion, reputation for certain dishes, etc.) will make certain choices more or less likely” (6).
The framework fits the soft rationalism of the political repression literature (for example, Gurr 1986; Poe, Tate, and Keith 1999; Poe 2004; Keith and Poe 2004; Davenport 2007a, 2007c). These scholars assume that political leaders are rational actors and that they choose from a menu of repressive tools that they see as the most effective means to achieve their chief end, which is to stay in power. And I assume that the most pervasive factor that increases leaders’ willingness to repress is a threat to the leaders’ rule, whether real or perceived, and that the more serious the threat, the more willing state leaders are to employ repression (Keith and Poe 2004). Or, as Davenport (2007a) argues more broadly, state actors utilize actual or threatened physical sanctions in order to impose “a cost on the target as well as deterring specific activities and/or beliefs perceived to be challenging to government personnel, practices or institutions” (2); however, state actors carefully weigh the costs and benefits of engaging in repressive action, and also consider a menu of alternative mechanisms of control, as well assessing the odds of achieving their goals with these tools (4 and citations therein).
This framework is broad enough to encompass one of the long-standing debates within international relations (for example, Katzenstein 1996a, 1996b; Finnemore and Sikkink 1998) that has informed a substantial empirical literature examining a variety of human rights–related behavior—the debate over “norms versus interests,” as it has been termed (Rosenblum and Saleyhan 2004). Generally, realists and rational functionalists perceive states as rational actors whose behavior is based primarily based upon narrow self-interest and is largely a function of the state’s calculation of the benefits and costs (Waltz 1979; Keohane 1984). State commitments to international human rights norms are perceived as “cheap talk” (Mearsheimer 1994) that gives way to more substantive interests of the state when in conflict. Conversely, constructivists emphasize the emergence and diffusion of international human norms through networks of domestic and transnational actors, who not only shape the discourse of international human rights but also rally publics to convince states to formally accept and to adhere to these norms (for example, Keck and Sikkink 1998; Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999). In addition, states are expected to comply with these norms because states have a propensity to comply with their legal obligations (Henkin 1979) or because they generally aspire to comply with the norm of pacta sunt servanda (agreements must be kept) (Chayes and Chayes 1993). These approaches fall within Most and Starr’s framework in that they perceive that a regime’s opportunities to use the tools of repression are either facilitated or constrained by its environment at both the domestic and international levels. In addition, the approaches assume that the willingness of a regime to employ these tools may be “intimately related to a decision maker’s calculations of advantage and disadvantage, of cost and benefit, that decision makers consider on both conscious and unconscious levels,” and they assume that these decision makers “see their own behavior constrained within a range of opportunities presented by the environment (governmental, domestic, and international)” (Most and