1. Lecture Outline ► What is political repression? ► What factors increase the likelihood of repression? ► How does opposition react to repression?

2. Political Repression ► “The use or threat of coercion in varying degrees applied by government against opponents or potential opponents to weaken their resistance to the will of the authorities” ► Varies by intensity and scope

3. Bases of Political Rights ► Universal Declaration of Human Rights ► International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ► Genocide Convention ► Convention Against Torture

4. Who can violate rights? ► State as guarantor of rights ► State as violator of rights  Police  Military  Intelligence Apparatus  Paramilitaries

5. The Roving Bandit ► Lack of order ► Lack of security ► Unpredictability ► Self-defeating

6. The Stationary Bandit ► Assumes rational actor ► Security ► Predictability ► Recycling wealth

7. System-Based Incentive Structure - Assume political survival is priority - Fundamentally different methods to reach this goal

8. Democracies ► Large winning coalition (WC)  Provision of ‘private goods’ highly inefficient  Provision of ‘public goods’ logical choice ► Failure to supply adequate public goods results in political demise

9. Non-Democracies ► Small winning coalition (WC)  Provision of ‘public goods’ unnecessary and debilitating  Provision of ‘private goods’ highly inefficient ► Failure to supply adequate private goods results in political demise

10. Take Two: State of Democracy ► 120 card-carrying democracies ► Differentiation between ‘democracies’ and ‘liberal democracies’ ► Consolidated versus unconsolidated democracies

11. Repression I: A ‘Public Acceptance’ Model ► Policy based on repression and/or loyalty ► Role of repression: discourage the creation, or growth, of opposition political groups. - Goal is to increase relative attractiveness of ruling regime

12. Seeking a Balance - Increased use of repression reduces perceived gains of cooperating with opposition. - Too much repression increases perceived gains of cooperating with opposition.

13. Repression II: ‘Elite Level’ Model ► Repression based on perceived strength of opposition. ► Use of formal mechanisms of repression (e.g., martial law)

14. Information ► Imperfect Information: Leads potentially rational leaders to act irrationally. ► Caused by lack of public debate, social distance of leaders and fear in upper echelons of power

15. Summary ► State coercion can be on the scale of mass terror, but under a ‘rational’ despot it is typically targeted ► Repression depends on perceived magnitude of threat ► Moderation of coercion

16. Dictator versus Totalitarian ► Functionality versus ideology ► Closed versus open (often obligatory) party memberships as supreme government structures ► Partial versus complete monopolization on the use of force ► Semi-open versus monopolized means of communication ► Occasional versus systemic terroristic police control ► Decentralized versus centralized economy