A puzzle from last class

• Last class ended with: “democracies are not innocent”
• Democracies have also inflicted mass civilian deaths:
  • US in the Philippines, 1899–1902
  • British Boer War concentration camps in South Africa
  • US bombing Japan, 1945
  • France in Algeria, 1954–62
  • US wars on Indigenous peoples (near-total extermination)
• What is different about these cases based on what you know of state violence and autocracy?

Democracy refresher

• Democracy: political power constrained by competitive elections, civil liberties, rule of law
  • Liberalization: degree to which policies are publicly contested
  • Inclusiveness: share of the population involved in the political process
• Neither condition alone is sufficient
  • Apartheid South Africa had competitive elections for whites only
  • North Korea has 99% turnout but non-competitive elections

Democracy and political repression

• One of the most consistent findings in research on political repression:
  • Higher levels of democracy \(\rightarrow\) lower use of political repression
• Remember Olson: the Golden Goose gets to vote!
• Supported across nearly every empirical study from the 1970s to the late 1990s

Accountability and elections

• Autocrats are accountable to their elite coalition, if that
• Democratic leaders face regular, competitive elections
• Violence usually creates opponents and motivates against the incumbent
• The cost-benefit calculus of repression changes when leaders can be removed
• Competition (in theory) produces better leaders who may be less likely to be violent

Civil liberties

• Free press, civil society organizations, and independent courts document abuses
  • Documentation creates evidence: for courts, for elections, for international pressure
  • State violence in democracies is harder to hide than in closed systems
• Civil liberties make repression more costly by making it visible
  • This does not eliminate violence but it lowers the probability that violence is deniable

Separation of powers

• Democratic systems distribute power across branches: executive, legislative, judicial
  • No single actor can unilaterally order and execute repression without oversight
  • Courts can declare repressive actions unconstitutional
  • Legislatures can investigate, defund, or legislate against repressive agencies
  • This raises the organizational cost of repression
• This is why democratic backsliding often targets institutions first
• When these institutions are weakened, the structural brake on repression weakens with them

Inclusion

• State violence is often a response to dissent: strikes, protests, organizing, demands for rights
• When citizens have legitimate channels (voting, unions, civil society, litigation) they use them
  • Political participation substitutes for confrontation
  • Grievances can be addressed through institutions rather than suppressed by force
• Recall the dictator’s dilemma:
  • Autocrats repress partly because of distribution and information problems
  • Inclusion resolves this dilemma: citizens who can vote and organize do not need to rebel
  • Dissent is visible and channeled
• This also works in reverse: exclusion generates conditions that make violence “necessary”
  • Apartheid South Africa excluded non-white citizens \(\rightarrow\) resistance \(\rightarrow\) massive repression
  • Jim Crow South excluded Black Americans \(\rightarrow\) civil rights movement \(\rightarrow\) state violence
  • The violence was a consequence of exclusion, not just of racial animus

Legitimacy derived from consent

1. Democratic governments derive their right to rule from elections and popular consent
   • Losing power means losing an election, not death or imprisonment
   • The lower stakes of political competition reduce the incentive to eliminate opponents
2. When democratic governments use violence, they must justify it to citizens
   • Violence requires public legitimation: leaders must make the case that force is necessary
   • Unjustifiable violence delegitimizes the government in the eyes of voters, courts, and allies

Professionalized bureaucracies for coercive agents

• Democratic policing and military institutions develop professional norms
  • Rule of law, due process, proportional use of force
  • Civilian oversight creates accountability for individual officers and soldiers
  • Professional training shapes what agents understand as acceptable conduct
• Professional norms reduce individual willingness to repress (but do not eliminate it!)
  • Coercive agents in democracies have oversight structures that (in theory) punish abuse

When does democracy fail to constrain violence?

• The evidence is strong: democracy reduces repression, and change matters too
  • Autocratization increases repression; democratization decreases it
• But where accountability to constituents is absent, these mechanisms weaken

Democracy protects constituents

• Most state violence research studies violence against citizens
  • The mechanisms we just covered all assume political standing: you can vote, organize, sue
  • Colonial subjects, occupied populations, etc. had none of that
• Some argue democratic mass killings happened secretly, by rogue agencies acting alone
  • Valentino’s rebuttal: most were public and broadly supported
  • E.g., US bombing campaigns in Japan were not secret; majorities still approve today
• Democracy does not eliminate violence, it redirects it to those who cannot hold it accountable
  • And democracies can authorize and legitimate violence if it is publicly supported

Electoral incentives and violence

• Even within democracies, who gets protected may depend on electoral math
• E.g., research on Hindu-Muslim riots in India shows riots are more likely before elections
  • And more likely in constituencies where previous elections were competitive
• Why: Hindus are divided by caste; riots make religious identity more salient than caste
  • This consolidates the Hindu vote and some politicians benefit from that
  • The state allows or fails to prevent violence when doing so serves the coalition
• The same logic can protect minorities when their votes are pivotal
  • The state’s coercive capacity is deployed to protect when protection is “profitable”

Think-pair-share

• Think about the human rights situation at the center of your final project:
  • Is the regime in your case democratic or authoritarian? Somewhere in between?
  • If democratic, does that make the state violence harder to explain?
  • Based on the audience for your brief, does regime type shape what you say?
  • What does your case suggest about the relationship between regime type and state crime?
• You don’t need to move around; discuss with whoever is sitting near you

For Monday: propaganda and state violence

• Democracies are less likely on average than autocracies to commit state crimes
• We have seen that electoral incentives shape state violence within democracy
• Monday: what role does information play?
  • If politicians benefit from mobilizing groups against each other, information is a tool
  • Can propaganda cause mass violence, and can we separate correlation from causation?
  • Case study: hate radio and the Rwandan genocide
  • Note: Parts of this reading are very technical. Skip or skim the math; focus on understanding the key takeaways!