Political Repression. Linda Camp Keith
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of very important interests and activities over which the individual rather than the state has been given final control” (Beatty 1994, 16). In addition, the law itself may serve as a socializing agent and, when coupled with a strong civil society and a judiciary that is at least somewhat independent, may cultivate a budding rights consciousness within the state (MacGuigan 1965; Martin 1991; Murphy 1993; Tate and Vallinder 1995; Epp 1998). Thus, bills of rights and a judiciary empowered with judicial review could potentially change the menu of appropriate choices, change the costs of inappropriate choices, and influence the values through which the regime will evaluate the choices. Empirical evidence has been somewhat mixed, however. I next turn to the body of empirical literature on political repression.
The Empirical Literature on Political Repression
Over the last two decades we have seen tremendous growth in the body of empirical research that has sought to explain states’ human rights behavior, which in part has been driven by the creation and dissemination of large-N cross-national data sets. This research has primarily focused on two categories of human rights behavior that fall within the broader concept of political repression; however, increasingly, global cross-national studies have sought to explain other human rights, such as economic or basic needs rights, workers’ rights, women’s rights, and asylum or refugee rights. While this book’s focus continues within the larger set of studies, those examining political repression, I expect that the research here will also substantially inform studies of the broader set of human rights. And because this study is also informed in part by those studies, I try to incorporate their findings where appropriate.
Measuring Political Repression
As Davenport (2007) notes, most cross-national studies of human rights tend to focus on two dimensions of state repression separately—primarily addressing the more severe category 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, to a somewhat lesser extent, 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 2002; Walker and Poe 2002; Howard and Carey 2004). Studies of abuses of personal integrity have tended to dominate the field, in part because of the egregious nature of the repression, but also in part because, as Risse et al. (1999) note, “these basic ‘rights of the person’ have been most accepted as universal rights, and not simply rights associated with a particular political ideology or system” (3). Studies of personal integrity abuse have tended to employ the dominant indicators in the field: the Political Terror Scale (PTS) or Cingranelli and Richard’s (CIRI) physical integrity measures. The Political Terror Scale (PTS) was originally developed by Stohl and others (Gibney and Stohl 1988; Poe 1992; Gibney and Dalton 1996) and is maintained by Gibney (2011). The CIRI measures are similar to the Political Terror Scale, but the dimensions are disaggregated to measure imprisonment, torture, disappearances, and killings separately (Cingranelli and Richards 1999a, 1999b); however, they are frequently used as an additive index. Studies of the second category of repression, civil liberties restrictions, have also tended to use two dominant measurements: Taylor and Jodice’s (1983) negative sanctions (Davenport 1995a, 1995b, 1996) and Freedom House’s (McColm 1990) Civil Liberties Index (Keith 2002b; Walker and Poe 2002; Davenport 2007b). While most literature to date has focused on political repression as either restrictions of civil liberties or violations of personal integrity, Davenport’s (2007a) most recent work conceptualizes state repression in terms of the degree of lethality that encompasses both the violence dimension captured within the PTS measure and the restrictions captured within the Freedom House measure. These measures will be discussed and examined more fully in Chapter 3.
Major Findings in the Empirical Literature
Political scientists have created a significant body of research examining both domestic and international influences on political repression. In the past couple of decades we have seen the creation and dissemination of large cross-national data sets that encompass all countries and increasingly longer periods. Over time, both our measurements and statistical methodologies have improved substantially. The majority of large-N cross-national studies of state repression have typically focused on explanatory factors that are primarily domestic. These factors largely reflect rational actor assumptions, and they capture both agent (regime) and environment dimensions (domestic threat and opposition and socioeconomic conditions). As Davenport and Armstrong (2004) note, over time a “standard” model has emerged in the repression literature (Poe and Tate 1994; Poe, Tate, and Keith 1999 and citations therein). The standard model has typically included measures of domestic threats or opposition, regime type (democracy, autocracy, military, and leftist), and socioeconomic conditions (economic development, population, and colonial legacy). These influences represent the most consistently studied expectations in the cross-national literature. Some of these factors have proven to be more significant than others in empirical analyses. I discuss these findings in the section that follows. Each of the eight conditions in this standard model represents the domestic context or environment of the state, with one exception (international war, which is a part of the broader state concern with threats to the regime). This context either creates or constrains the regime’s opportunities to repress or affects the regime’s decision-making calculation of the advantage or disadvantage to exercising repressive tools as a means to achieve its policy goals. The body of empirical work has gradually expanded beyond domestic influences to examine a variety of international or transnational influences, including bilateral aid, multilateral lending programs, international treaty regimes, trade relations, and foreign investment. In this section I seek to identify the most important factors that have been shown to constrain or facilitate a state’s choice to employ the tool of repression, while at the same time identifying some of the weaknesses that still limit our understanding of such behavior. I discuss domestic influences first, then the international or transnational influences, noting, of course, that increasingly these contexts are difficult to separate from each other.
Domestic Influences
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