Political Repression and Public Perceptions of Human Rights

Abstract

Based on data from 18 Central and East European countries collected between 1991 and 1996, this article tests informational assumptions underlying strategic interaction and collective action models of goverment repression and dissent. Specifically, we investigate whether citizens' perceptions of human rights conditions in a country are systematically related to that country's actual conditions of government repression. The analysis suggests that there is a significant relationship between evalutions of human rights conditions and levels of government repression. Moreover, it shows that other political and economic conditions affect human rights evaluations, but that these relations do not lead to a weaening in the relationship between repressive conditions and public perceptions of human rights.