Economic crises, civilian mobilization, and repression in developing states

Abstract

Research on the causes of repression has had limited success in connecting economic crises to state-led violence. We develop an explanation for violent government repression in urban areas, which links the importance of urban infrastructure in enabling civilians to wage an effective opposition campaign with the stress caused by economic crisis, empirically validating the underlying mechanisms using disaggregated geospatial data. We then confirm the empirical expectation that governments will violently repress during times of economic crisis where the civilians’ capacity to wage a collective action campaign is high using a disaggregated global sample of urban areas within developing states.