The Weight of the Past: Exploring Lagged Determinants of Political Repression

Abstract

The present article investigates contemporaneous and lagged effects of de mocracy, coercive capacity, and political conflict on repressive behavior. As designed, 51 countries from 1948 to 1982 are examined with an Almon distributed lag model on yearly data (N =1820). From the empirical inves tigation, both short- and long-term relationships are found to be signifi cantly related to the rate at which censorship and political restrictions are applied. Past values of democracy are found to affect repression negatively for five years and past values of dissident behavior are found to affect re pression positively for seven years. I conclude that a relatively complex memory structure, encompassing both short- and long-term explanations, must be employed when one attempts to understand why states use re pressive behavior.