The Leader’s Toolkit: How Leaders Choose Their Tools of Repression

• In Event: Paramilitaries, Praetorians, Police: Designing & Deploying State Security Forces

Abstract

For many leaders, maintaining and prolonging their time in office is a top priority. In order to do so, they may want to use repression to quell dissent and stymie the opposition. Once a leader makes the decision to repress, they must decide how to repress. First, leaders must choose a security apparatus to carry out the repression on their behalf. Leaders may have a wide variety of repressive tools to choose from, including their standing military, militias, police forces, gangs, and other similar groups. Each security apparatus provides a different combination of benefits and drawbacks, including varying amounts of plausible deniability for a leader. Therefore, how do leaders select a security apparatus to achieve their repressive aims? In order to analyze how leaders choose their tools of repression, this paper uses a novel dataset connecting security apparatuses to their respective human rights violations for 15 countries from 1989-2016. By identifying the amount of abuse attributed to each group, the analysis finds a varying effect of plausible deniability on group selection for repressive actions. More specifically, groups that can potentially provide more plausible deniability for a leader tend to commit the most egregious levels of human rights violations.

Author

• Lora DiBlasi, Michigan State University