Abstract
Received wisdom holds that democracies pay more respect to physical integrity rights than do non-democracies. Time and again, however, political realities belie this so-called domestic democratic peace. Even high-capacity democracies engage in torture, political imprisonment, extrajudicial killings, and forced disappearances. Using data on 29 countries between 1995 and 2007, this chapter studies triggers of and remedies to human rights abuses in democratic regimes. Departing from the well-known threat-repression nexus, it hypothesizes that democracies disrespect physical integrity in response to violent political threats, e.g., riots and terrorism. However, the degree to which democratic governments exploit such challenges for human rights abuses depends on the strength of the judiciary. In the presence of strong, autonomous courts, the chapter hypothesizes, governments are confined to lawful action. Consequently, as the strength of the judiciary increases, violent threats should become less conducive to physical integrity violations. While the analysis supports the provocative effect of riots and terrorism, it yields scant evidence that strong judiciaries pacify government action. In conclusion, established democracies fight fire with fire, and they turn out to be more than occasional sinners.
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- 1.
This chapter strongly benefited from many critical comments and suggestions by Onawa Promise Lacewell, who also authored parts of an earlier draft. Furthermore, I would like to thank Julian Brückner, Heiko Giebler, Sascha Kneip, Alexander Petring, Aiko Wagner, Annika Werner, Bernhard Weßels, and Wolfgang Merkel who provided invaluable advice.
- 2.
- 3.
Note that this interpretation boils down to an exclusively reactive take on government-sponsored physical integrity violations. It discards much detail of the behavioral reciprocity between political dissidents and governments. In other words, political dissent might precede as well as follow violent state coercion, implying a certain endogeneity of the research design. However, this analysis ultimately focuses on institutional remedies against government-sponsored physical integrity violations once behavioral threats have been identified. A reactive interpretation suffices for the problem at hand because even an endogenous relationship between political threats and government responses should still be moderated by political institutions.
- 4.
The countries are Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Costa Rica, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and the USA.
- 5.
Given the importance of the CIRI data, some detail on the coding process is justified. Cingranelli and Richards take only violations into account where citizens come to harm by the hands of government agents within the internationally recognized borders of the state. This excludes human rights violations such as the events of Abu Ghraib in late 2003. Moreover, each violation is to be treated separately, even if there is only one victim. If, for example, a criminal suspect suffers lethal injuries from police brutality, the incidence will be counted as both torture and extrajudicial killing. In order to increase inter-coder reliability, Cingranelli and Richards instruct their coders to rely on numerical thresholds whenever possible. A score of 2 is to be awarded when there are no confirmed incidences, a score of 1 if there is at least one confirmed incident, and a score of 0 if there are at least 50 confirmed incidences of abuse. Finally, Cingranelli and Richards provide their coders with a list of keywords to judge the frequency of physical integrity violations, whenever the information is insufficient to apply the numerical thresholds (see Cingranelli and Richards 2008).
- 6.
- 7.
The following definitions apply: (a) demonstrations (“Dissent collectively, publicly show negative feelings or opinions; rally, gather to protest a policy, action, or actor(s)”), (b) strikes (“Protest by refusing to work or cooperate until certain demands are met, [...]”), (c) riots (“Protest forcefully, in a potentially destructive manner, [...]”) (Schrodt 2012, 66ff.).
- 8.
The set of state actors includes police forces, the government in terms of the executive and governing parties, the military, and the state intelligence agencies (Schrodt 2012, p. 93). Whenever one of these actors was coded as the source of political dissent, the event was excluded from the analysis.
- 9.
South Africa skews the distribution of the dependent variable tremendously. As a precaution against potential problems during the estimation stage I log-transform the index in all subsequent models (see Fox and Weisberg 2011, p. 140).
- 10.
To analyze possible trends, I used variance partition models with varying intercepts and varying slopes on t. I found positive statistically significant trends for the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Slovenia, and France. The most complex of these models reads y it = β 0u[i] + β 1u[i] t it + E it . Here y it indicates the logged measurement of physical integrity violations in country i at time t, β 0u[i] is a short-hand notation for the country-varying intercept, and β 1u[i] denotes the by-country-varying coefficient on the trend indicator t it . Finally, E it denotes the error term. More detail is available from Table 13.3 in the appendix. Moreover, following advice from Rabe-Hesketh and Skrondal (2008, 473ff.) and Gelman and Hill (2006, 243f.), I ran additional cross-classified models. Such models group observations by countries and years simultaneously. They are sensitive to temporal influences that apply to individual observation years and affect all countries jointly. Once I introduced the linear trend, the grouping by observations years became redundant. Thus, my data offer little evidence of temporal influences that stick to particular observation years such as the 9/11 attacks. All models were estimated and inspected using the methods and techniques provided by Wickham (2009), Fox and Weisberg (2011), Bates et al. (2013), Pinheiro et al. (2013), and R Core Team (2013).
- 11.
For detailed results, please refer to Table 13.4 in the Appendix.
- 12.
The fully specified individual level model is:
y it = β 0i + β 1i t it + β 2 Threat Peace,it + β 3 Threat Violent,it + β 4 Inequality it + β 5 Pop. Growth it + β 6 War it + E it ,
with varying intercept (β 0i ) and slope (β 1i )
β 0i = γ 00 + γ 01 Rule of Law i + γ 02 Electoral Competition i + u 0i
β 1i = γ 10 + u 1i ,
and cross-level interaction effect
β 3 = γ 30 + γ 31 Rule of Law i .
By convention cross-level interactions often include a varying slope for the focal predictor, i.e., β 2 in this case. Since there is little theoretical reason to believe that the effect of violent political threats differs by established democracy and additional testing proved this variance component insignificant, I do not include a varying slope for violent political threats.
- 13.
See column IV of Table 13.4 in the Appendix.
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Tanneberg, D. (2018). Why Do Established Democracies Violate Human Rights?. In: Merkel, W., Kneip, S. (eds) Democracy and Crisis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72559-8_13
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