Conditions Affecting the Use of Political Repression

Abstract

The task of this study is to determine if certain political and socioeconomic variables have strong relationships with political repression conceptualized as disappearance, detention, torture, and political killings. The perspective of the study is from the question of why do people in power — with so many options available — choose repression as a method of rule. Repression is coded into numerical values from the State Department Country Reports, and then relationships with the degree of democracy, socioeconomic conditions, inequality, rate of economic change, and the level of economic development are tested in regression models. Significant relationships are found. The degree of democracy, the extent of inequality in society, and economic growth rate go a long way to explain and predict political repression in a parsimonious model.