Political Repression

Does authoritarian rule benefit from political repression? This book claims that it does, if restrictions and violence, two fundamentally different forms of repression, complement each other. Based on an in-depth quantitative analysis of the post-Second World War period, the author draws three central conclusions. Firstly, restrictions and violence offer different advantages, suffer from different drawbacks, and matter differently for identical problems of authoritarian rule. Secondly, empirical data supports complementarity only as long as political repression preempts political opposition. Lastly, despite its conceptual centrality, political repression has little influence on the outcomes of authoritarian politics. The book also offers new insights into questions such as whether repression hinders successful political campaigns or whether it is more likely to trigger coups d’état.

From torture to fake news, this book lays out how the Bahrain regime has used political repression and violence to fight social movements.

"A Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Book" -- dust jacket.

Originally published in 1983. The nineteenth century was a time of great economic, social and political change. As Europe modernized, previously ignorant and apathetic elements in the population began to demand political freedoms. There was pressure also for a freer press, for the rights of assembly and association. The apprehension of the existing elites manifested itself in an intensification of often brutal form of political repression. The first part of this book summarizes on a pan-European basis, the major techniques of repression such as the denial of popular franchise and press censorship. This is followed by a chronological survey of these techniques from 1815 – 1914 in each European country. The book analyzes the long and short-term importance of these events for European historical development in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Introduction: repression and mobilization : insights from political science and sociology / Christian Davenport -- Protest mobilization, protest repression, and their interaction / Clark McPhail and John D. McCarthy -- Precarious regimes and matchup problems in the explanation of repressive policy / Vince Boudreau -- The dictator's dilemma / Ronald A. Francisco -- When activists ask for trouble : state-dissident interactions and the New Left cycle of resistance in the United States and Japan / Gilda Zwerman and Patricia Steinhoff -- Talking the walk : speech acts and resistance in authoritarian regimes / Hank Johnston -- Soft repression : ridicule, stigma, and silencing in gender-based movements / Myra Marx Ferree -- Repression and the public sphere : discursive opportunities for repression against the extreme right in Germany in the 1990s / Ruud Koopmans -- On the quantification of horror : notes from the field / Patrick Ball -- Repression, mobilization, and explanation / Charles Tilly -- How to organize your mechanisms : research programs, stylized facts, and historical narratives / Mark Lichbach.

The world seems to have reached agreement on a set of ideals regarding state human rights behavior and the appropriate institutions to promote and protect those ideals. The global script for state legitimacy calls for a written constitution or the equivalent with an embedded bill of rights, democratic processes and institutions, and increasingly, a judicial check on state power to protect human rights. While the progress toward universal formal adherence to this global model is remarkable, Linda Camp Keith argues that the substantive meaning of this progress is much less clear. In Political Repression, she seeks to answer two key questions: Why do states make formal commitments to democratic processes and human rights? What effect do these commitments have on actual state behavior, especially political repression? The book begins with a thorough exploration of a variety of tools of state repression and presents evidence for substantial formal acceptance of international human rights norms in constitutional documents as well as judicial independence. Keith finds that these institutions reflect the diffusion of global norms and standards, the role of transnational networks of nongovernmental organizations, and an electoral logic in which regimes seek to protect their future interests. Economic liberalism, on the other hand, decreases the likelihood that states adopt or maintain these provisions. She demonstrates that the level of judicial independence is influenced by constitutional structures and that levels of judicial independence subsequently achieved in turn diminish the probability of state repression of a variety of rights. She also finds strong evidence that rights provisions may indeed serve as a constraint on state repression, even when controlling for many other factors.

This work seeks to improve our understanding of why states use political repression, highlighting its relationship to dissent and mass protest. The authors draw upon a variety of political-economic contexts, methodological approaches, and geographic locales

This book explores and tests different theories of how governments respond to dissent and how dissidents respond to repression using extensive empirical data and detailed studies on Latin America and Africa.