(iPoster) Organizing Repression: How Democracies Divide Repressive Labor

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Participation and Representation & Democracy and Autocracy II
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Democracy and Autocracy II

Abstract

Why do democracies carry out extralegal violence against their citizens? Specifically, how and why do democracies allocate the division of repressive labor between different coercive institutions? I develop a theory examining why state actors in democracies use distinct forms of coercive institutions to repress different types of citizens. I argue that weak democracies rely on informal coercive institutions when they want to raise the costs of opposition to their rule, but when using formal security bureaucracies to silence a particular type of opposition will increase the probability of backlash (Esberg 2021). I disaggregate the state’s coercive apparatus into formal coercive institutions (e.g., military and police), whose ties to the state are public knowledge, and informal coercive institutions (e.g., pro-state militias, paramilitary groups), whose ties to the state provide the regime with plausible deniability (Koren and Mukherjee 2021). I show that informal coercive institutions overwhelmingly target “soft” targets (i.e., political and cultural, non-violent opposition, such as academics, journalists, and artists), while formal coercive institutions are used to repress “hard” targets (i.e., militant, violent opposition, such as insurgents). Overall, I argue that the pattern of repression across different coercive institutions is shaped by democratic actors’ incentives to maximize the appearance of adhering to the democratic rule of law for domestic and international audiences while minimizing backlash (Roessler 2005, Carey et al. 2015).

This approach challenges conventional approaches to the study of state repression, where literature on autocracies focuses on variation in type and level of repression by formal organizations, while studies of democracies focus on how formal organizations exceed the limits of their mandates (Magaloni et al. 2020, Shen-Bayh 2018, Esberg 2021). The implication of this project is that, by trying to do it all—repressing soft targets by relying on informal coercive institutions to avoid scrutiny from the domestic and international public and ceding power to formal coercive institutions to eliminate hard targets—, members of democratic regimes chip away at the very institutions meant to safeguard their ability to govern. I explore how and why democracies target different sets of individuals with distinct forms of coercive institutions through case studies in Latin America. I draw on the cases of democratic Argentina and Uruguay in the 1960s and 1970s, prior to their respective transitions to authoritarianism. I use process tracing of material from regional and national archives, as well as interviews with civilian and military elites, to show that state repression began before transitions to autocracy in both countries, and that formal and informal coercive institutions repressed different sets of individuals in the name of combatting “internal subversives” (Baumtgartner 2011, López de la Torre 2021, Larraquy 2023).

Author

• Julia Lodoen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology