The Geography of Repression and Opposition to Autocracy

Abstract

State repression is a prominent feature of nondemocracies, but its effectiveness in quieting dissent and fostering regime survival remains unclear. We exploit the location of military bases before the coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile in 1973, which is uncorrelated to precoup electoral outcomes, and show that counties near these bases experienced more killings and forced disappearances at the hands of the government during the dictatorship. Our main result is that residents of counties close to military bases both registered to vote and voted "No" to Pinochet's continuation in power at higher rates in the crucial 1988 plebiscite that bolstered the democratic transition. Potential mechanisms include informational frictions on the intensity of repression in counties far from bases and shifts in preferences caused by increased proximity to the events. Election outcomes after democratization show no lasting change in political preferences.Verification Materials: The data and materials required to verify the computational reproducibility of the results, procedures and analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: http://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/EYAWES. S tate repression is a prominent feature of nondemocracies (Davenport and Armstrong 2004;Davenport 2007b). However, the effectiveness of repression in quieting dissent and fostering regime survival remains unclear (Lichbach 1987;Wintrobe 1998). Evidence is scant on whether repression leads to long-lasting fear and submissiveness or whether it bolsters political opposition. This is a difficult ques-tion to answer empirically because repression is not randomly assigned and responds to a strategic calculation (Klor, Saiegh, and Satyanath 2020; Ritter and Conrad 2016). Naive comparisons across areas or periods with varying levels of repression are thus likely to be confounded by unobserved differences in underlying factors such as political attitudes or social capital.

Repression and Dissent in Moments of Uncertainty: Panel Data Evidence from Zimbabwe

“…Our findings, therefore, add new empirical evidence in support of theories of protest cascades (Kuran 1991) and cut against recent evidence that potential dissidents are more likely to dissent when they learn that protests will be smaller than expected (Cantoni et al 2019). Our evidence on the effects of repression is also consistent with recent findings that exposure to the levels of repression commonly used against nonviolent opposition in contemporary regimes is mobilizing for those who are indirectly exposed (Aytaç and Stokes 2019; Bautista et al 2021; Pan and Siegel 2021; Steinert-Threlkeld, Chan, and Joo 2022). We do not find evidence of an “inverse-U” relationship between repression and subsequent dissent in our data.…”

Predictors of perceptions of human rights violations during the Chilean social outburst of 2019

“…Other works could further explore the relationship between threats and support for human rights restrictions in the context of protest and civil unrest, which has usually emphasized other types of perceived threats ( McLaren, 2003 ; Barth et al, 2015 ; Abrams et al, 2017 ). Finally, future research could explore the impacts other context-sensitive factors not included in this study, such as personal experience with human rights violations ( Bautista et al, 2023 ) and prosecutions ( Sikkink and Walling, 2007 ; Kim and Sikkink, 2010 ), and naming and shaming of one’s country by international organizations ( Ausderan, 2014 ).…”

Dissent Networks, State Repression, and Strategic Clemency for Defection

“…Space may also shape states’ repression strategies (Christensen, 2018; Bautista et al, 2021). For instance, regimes may have a strong incentive to kill more people when dissent movements cluster in an area.…”