Electoral Accountability for Repression

• In Event: Elections and Violence

Abstract

Do competitive elections keep democratic leaders from repressing? If so, under what conditions? Existing research proposes that elections provide a key constraint on democrats' likelihood of repressing based on the assumption that voters will fail to reelect repressive leaders. However, previous work has not examined variance in voters’ propensity to punish repression. In this paper, I argue that democratic voters are unlikely to punish repression (1) when they do not fear future victimization and (2) when they can be convinced of the justifiability of repression. Because of these factors, I argue that democratic leaders can repress minority ethnic groups outside their winning coalition without reducing their likelihood of survival. I test my argument using two novel empirical strategies. First, I use PULSAR (Parsing Unstructured Language into Sentiment-Aspect Representations) to create a novel dataset on the targets of repression across democracies. I analyze the relationship between the target of repression and leaders' survival rates in democracies from 1975-2017 and find that leaders evade electoral punishment when they repress minorities outside their winning coalition. Second, I use an original survey experiment to evaluate the individual-level implications of my argument. I find that individual support for repressive leaders varies based on the ethnic identity of the target of repression. Together, these findings suggest that democratic leaders are sometimes constrained by voters, but that vertical accountability is not always enough to prevent repression.

Author

• Kelly Elizabeth Morrison, University of Gothenburg