Repression, Group Threat, and the Threat Environment

• In Event: Poster Session: Conflict Processes I

Abstract

How do governments contend with multiple sources of dissident threat? In general, the answer is “repression”: the government attempts to keep the public out of the political process by using coercive force. This answer makes repression appear more monolithic than it is. The government tailors its repression based on the threats it is facing, or its threat environment: organized groups require certain repressive strategies, while latent dissent that threatens to mobilize may require others.

These types of repression can be categorized into two broad strategies of repression based on how the repression keeps the public out. The first strategy, reactive repression, stops dissent action by making a deterrent threat. The government threatens coercive action which raises the costs of posing a dissident challenge. If the repression is severe enough, the dissidents will back down. The second strategy is preventive repression, which serves a more mechanistic role: it makes it harder for latent dissent to mobilize. For example, the government may limit the public’s right to assembly. While this could be a deterrent threat depending on the severity of the punishment, it need not be to serve its repressive purpose: limiting the public’s ability to assemble also limits their ability to meet and collaborate. Instead of making the act of posing a challenge costly, the government makes the initial step of forming a group difficult.

Sometimes these styles of repression can be used in conjunction. If the active groups and latent dissidents have similar aims, the government can use a single act of repression to get the active groups to back down and prevent new groups from forming. By repressing heavily the first time a challenge is posed, the government sends a signal to the remaining groups that they will be repressed if they attempt to mount a challenge. This extends to the general population as well – dissidents who were on the fence about joining a group back out. These are clearly examples of reactive repression in action – the government has made it so that dissident action is costly, which stops groups from posing a challenge. In addition, the removal of those dissidents who were on the fence from the pool of potential dissidents makes it difficult for new groups to form: there are fewer potential dissidents in the pool, making it less likely that the dissidents will be able to meet and form a group. Here the repression is also preventive – while it did impose a cost on action, it also made it mechanically more difficult for dissidents to meet and collaborate by limiting the pool of potential dissidents.

Given the number of dissident threats a government faces, it is unlikely they will all be similar enough for a single act of repression to work via both channels. If groups have differing aims, they will not be able to draw conclusions about how the government will treat them from its past behavior. The government will thus have to deal with each threat individually. This can be problematic, as the government has a limited budget for repression and may not have enough resources to address every threat. As such, we should expect the government’s investments in repression to vary based on the threat environment: the number of active groups, the potential for new groups to arise, and how their aims align.

In this paper, I show how the threat environment influences the government’s use of repression. Using a formal model, I show that the government’s investments in repression shift depending on the threats it faces. When an active group poses a greater threat than the possibility of a new group being formed, the government focuses on reactive repression – deterring the existing group but allowing new ones to form. As the formation of new groups gets more dangerous the government shifts resources away from reactive repression and towards preventive repression, making it more difficult for new groups to form but easier for established ones to pose challenges. This means that the government’s response to any one group is dependent on the characteristics of that group and the wider threat environment – the government will avoid repressing groups it might have otherwise to free up resources to stop dangerous new groups from forming.

Author

• Peter Carey, University of California, Merced