Militias or the Police? Riots, Protests, and Repressive Agent Choices

• In Event: Repression and Dissent Revisited

Abstract

Are militias and the police substitute or complementary agents of repression? Ample research now acknowledges the importance of auxiliaries -- militias and irregular forces -- to political violence and repression, yet surprisingly little attention has been given to how violence by these groups relates to the state's main repressive agent: the police. As a result, we do not yet understand the conditions under which militias are used for repression, and when will the police be employed, either instead of or in addition to auxiliaries. This study develops a combined formal and theoretical principal-agent framework, in which both auxiliaries and the police can be employed for repression. This framework illustrates that the police, as the more regulated force and the one more likely to follow orders, is used to repress aggressive riots, where being connected for violence is less costly for the regime. In contrast, militias are used for violent repression during nonviolent protests, when being associated with violence is very costly to the government. We empirically verify these linkages on country-month data for Africa using panel vector-autoregression (pVAR) models to account for endogeneity not only between the dependent and independent variables, but also between the two dependent variables. We complement these statistical results with case-based evidence from specific countries. The finding that militias and police are complements rather than substitutes of repression not only opens new lines of research inquiry but also highlight areas of policy intervention.

Author

• Ore Koren, Indiana University Bloomington