The logic of political repression: Human rights abuse during national and international crises

In recent years, studies of human rights abuse have attempted to account for the role of threat perception in determining levels of state repression. To date, the vast majority of the analyses conducted have attempted to ascertain the extent to which internal conflict (in terms of protest, rebellion, etc.) may lead regimes to infringe upon citizens' personal integrity rights. There has been no systematic attempt to account for the role that external threat plays in the decision of political leaders to abuse the rights of the populace. This dissertation develops a generalizable model of state response to threat that considers both internal and external threats, using a decision-theoretic model first developed by Most and Starr for studying international conflict. I contend that the motivations for states to infringe upon the rights of their citizens are similar regardless of regime type, and I address the circumstances under which regimes from both ends of the ideological perspective (democracies and authoritarian states) will choose repression as a domestic policy. I focus on a broader scope of political repression, including not just personal integrity rights, but civil and political freedoms as well. By including a wider range of human rights and paying careful attention to the composition of regimes and other factors, I examine the decision of political leaders to choose a particular strategy from those available to them in response to domestic and external threats to their authority. I test this idea using data from the CIRI Human Rights Database. The dataset encompasses civil and political liberties as well as personal integrity violations. Taken together, the models provide a solid foundation for the development of alternative approaches for the study of the behavior of regimes from both ends of the political spectrum.