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Chapter 3

The Standard Model of Human Rights

December 2001, Gbarnga, Liberia: Students rioted to protest the killing of a fourth grade boy by the police commander; the police killed two more students during the demonstration in front of the police station. (U.S. Department of State 2001)

October and December 2008, Central Yerevan, Armenia: Newspaper editors Nikol Pashinian and Shogher Matevosian were arrested after participating in a march with supporters of the former President Levon Ter-Petrosian, a vocal critic of the government, and two months later the Gyumri-based television channel Gala TV was harassed by government officials following its broadcasting of Levon Ter-Petrosian’s campaigning activities. (Amnesty International 2009)

October 2005, Gambia: The government arrested and detained opposition leaders who had publicly criticized or who had expressed political views in disagreement with the government. (U.S. Department of State 2005)

May 2001, Liberia: Security forces detained 24 persons from a truckload of internally displaced persons fleeing fighting: it is believed that detainees were transported to the Gbatala military base; however, they have not been seen since. (U.S. Department of State 2001)

February 2007, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire: Moustapha Tounkara and Arthur Vincent, two young mobile phone salesmen, were arrested by members of the national security forces; their bullet-riddled bodies were found the next day. (Amnesty International 2007)

October 2005, Azerbaijan: The Court of Grave Crimes sentenced seven opposition leaders to between two and a half and five years in prison on alleged charges for their role in post-election violence; their convictions were based on confessions allegedly extracted under torture. (Human Rights Watch 2005)

August and September 2005, Ecuador: The state police arrested Washington Enrique Vilela Barra and Luis Antonio Cevallos Barre; their bodies were found the following day. Military officers patrolling the northern province of Sucumbios opened fire with no warning on a vehicle, killing Servio Pena Jimenez and seriously injuring Ramon Zamora Zamora. (U.S. Department of State 2005)

2004, Indonesia: Security forces continued to commit unlawful killings of rebels, suspected rebels, and civilians in areas of separatist activity, and the government largely failed to hold soldiers and police accountable for such killings and other serious human rights abuses. (U.S. Department of State 2004)

January 2004, Democratic Republic of Congo: Authorities at a military prison placed two civilians in front of freshly dug graves and then proceeded to bludgeon them to death with hammers. (Ibid.)

February 2004, Nepal: State soldiers killed 17-year-old Subhadra Chaulagain and 18-year-old Reena Rasaili, who were reportedly attempting to flee custody; it is alleged that the girls, who were accused by the Royal Nepalese Army of being Maoists, were captured, beaten, and raped before being killed. (Ibid.)

March 2004, Haiti: Five Haitian National Police officers arrested five youths from the pro-Aristide neighborhood of La Saline in Port-au-Prince; the next day their bodies, bearing signs of torture, were found near the airport. (Ibid.)

February 2000, Russia (Chechnya): The military used indiscriminate force in areas of significant civilian populations, resulting in numerous deaths, and also engaged in extrajudicial killings. For example, Russian riot police and contract soldiers executed at least 60 civilians in Aldi and Chernorechiye, suburbs of Grozny. (U.S. Department of State 2000)

January through October 1999, Burundi: Soldiers killed more than 55 civilians in Mubone, Kabezi commune, in May soldiers killed 11 Hutu civilians, including women and children, in July soldiers killed 30 civilians in Kanyosha commune, in August soldiers shot and killed an estimated 50 civilians in Kanyosha commune and used grenades and machine guns to kill an unknown number of civilians in Ruziba, Bujumbura Rural province, and in October a soldier shot and killed six persons, including three children and two women, at the Ruyaga regroupment site in Bujumbura Rural province—the army claims the civilians were collaborating with rebels. (U.S. Department of State 1999)

The long list above presents a very few examples of countless acts of political repression occurring throughout the world every year despite a near-universal commitment among nation-states not to engage in these behaviors. Social scientists committed to the study of human rights or contentious state politics have produced a substantive and growing body of empirical research that seeks to identify the factors that motivate these actors to engage in repression, and what circumstances enhance or constrain their opportunity and their willingness to utilize coercive tools against their own citizens. In this chapter I address the “standard model” that has developed over time, expanding it to cover a much longer period and broadening the model to reflect the subsequent developments in the literature regarding our conceptualization and measurement of democracy and to make use of newly available measures of specific individual rights. Because I find that the standard model as a whole continues to perform well in explaining a broad range of acts of political repression, I use these base models as the foundation for the analyses in the following chapters that examine that effect of the judiciary and the law on state repression.

Conceptualizing and Measuring Repression

I agree with Davenport’s (2007c) broad definition of political repression, which, while drawing generally on Goldstein (1978), still accurately reflects the consensus of the current literature: “By most accounts, repression involves the actual or threatened use of physical sanctions against an individual or organization, within the territorial jurisdiction of the state, for the purpose of imposing a cost on the target as well as deterring specific activities and/or beliefs perceived to be challenging to government personnel, practices or institutions” (2). Consensus among scholars dissipates somewhat when the focus narrows to the more specific nature of repression—in particular, whether repression should be conceptualized as being composed of a single dimension, or whether it is composed of multiple, distinct dimensions related to the form of coercion (for example, violence or coercion; see Stohl and Lopez 1984; Davenport 2007a), the breadth of the target (for example, actual dissenters or potential dissenters; see Wilkinson 1976), and the required resources, capabilities, and potential costs (see Mitchell and McCormick 1988; McCormick and Mitchell 1997). Most large-N cross-national studies of political repression have tended to focus on two forms of state repression separately—either addressing the more severe forms of repression, violations of personal integrity (imprisonment, torture, killing, and disappearances) (for example, Poe and Tate 1994; Poe, Tate, and Keith 1999; Cingranelli and Richards 1999a, 1999b; Keith 2002a; Keith, Tate, and Poe 2009), or addressing the broader category of civil liberties restrictions, or “negative sanctions,” as they are sometimes referred to in the literature (censoring the press, restricting freedom to assemble peacefully, or curbing religious freedoms) (for example, Davenport 1995a, 1995b, 2007a, 2007b; Keith 2002; Howard and Carey 2004; Walker and Poe 2002). The theoretical perspectives of the models employed in these studies are largely indistinguishable. Davenport (2007b) argues that while the two forms of repression share the same goal—to influence behavior and attitudes—they attempt to achieve the goal differently: civil liberties restrictions modify behavior through constraining and channeling opportunities; whereas personal integrity repression, such as killing and disappearances, modifies behavior through eliminating actors. Thus, it may be shortsighted to perceive repression as one-dimensional. However, as Davenport notes, to date most explanatory variables have similarly influenced both categories of repression, and therefore it is highly likely “that comparable processes underlie the coercive strategies” (487).

Davenport’s (2007a) work makes a substantial contribution to the field in that he specifically explores the question of whether state-sponsored restrictions and state-sponsored violence are equivalent behaviors. While the literature clearly agrees that states’ primary objective in employing coercive methods is to maintain or achieve political order, Davenport distinguishes how states pursue this goal. He argues that when states choose to restrict their citizens’ freedoms, “their goal is less to remove individuals/groups from society than it is to mold them within it,” and thus restrictions “establish parameters within which individuals (victims as well as bystanders) modify their behavior in an attempt to avoid sanctions in the present and future” (47). He then posits that states have a different goal in employing violent tools of repression, specifically arguing that “killing citizens eliminates a part of society deemed unacceptable while compelling acquiescence or guided change in others” (47). Davenport posits that it is useful to consider combinations of strategies that regimes may employ to take advantage of different cost/benefit structures or to communicate different messages. He suggests four basic combinations that are theoretically illustrative, although he ultimately creates and tests nine categories. The four combinations include the two extremes on a continuum: on one end the government does not engage in restrictions or violence, and at the other end the government engages in significant levels of both restrictions and violence. In between, the government either engages in significant amounts of restrictions but not violence, or the government engages in significant amounts of violence but not restrictions. Davenport argues that each combination allows government authorities distinct sets of costs and benefits. For example, “restrictions without violence allow government officials to regulate behavior without provoking the negative ramifications associated with state-sponsored violence,” and “violence without restrictions allows authorities to eliminate challengers but avoids the administration, monitoring, and pretense of legality commonly affiliated with civil liberties restrictions” (49). Davenport’s empirical analysis reveals that some factors known to influence repression generally affect certain categories of repression in opposing directions. For example, conflict and development/modernization decrease the probability of a state’s resort to less lethal forms of repressive action, yet these same factors increase the probability of a resort to more lethal repression. He also demonstrates that democracy generally increases the probability that a regime will employ less lethal forms of repressive activity while decreasing the probability that it will employ more lethal methods. As I demonstrate in the measurement section below, I am not confident that the current measures of repression allow us to capture firmly the distinction between lethal and nonlethal dimensions.

Davenport’s debate reflects an earlier debate among scholars who have examined personal integrity abuse and disputed whether this singular category of repression is itself multidimensional or unidimensional. Mitchell and McCormick (1988) have argued that the tools of repression within this subset are substantively distinct, and thus while “arbitrary political imprisonment was certainly reprehensible, resort to torture and killing was a distinct, and qualitatively worse, activity” (484). Poe and Tate (1994) disagreed, claiming that it could “be persuasively argued that the two dimensions postulated by Mitchell and McCormick stem, in reality, from the one dimension that Stohl and his colleagues tap [in their Political Terror Scale]—that both torture/killing and imprisonment are rooted in a regime’s willingness to repress its citizens when they are considered a threat” (855). McCormick and Mitchell (1997) disagree with Poe and Tate, contending instead that “human rights violations differ in type not just amount, such that they cannot be clearly represented on a single scale,” and in particular they argue that the use of imprisonment and the use of torture and killing are “quite different types of government activity, with differing consequences for the victims, differing use of governmental resources and capabilities, and differing costs for the government, both domestically and internationally” (514). They argue that governments or their agents engage in a calculation of costs and benefits when choosing among the tools of repression. However, their empirical analyses demonstrate only thin differences in predictor variables across two types of personal integrity abuse (imprisonment and torture). With one exception, the differences were tied to the level of achieved statistical significance, and most of these measures were ones that have performed thinly or inconsistently in other analyses that cover a longer period; McCormick and Mitchell’s analysis covers only the years 1984 and 1987. The one exception they find, civil war, has been one of the two predictors that have consistently achieved the highest level of statistical and substantive significance in personal integrity models, and civil war fails to achieve statistical significance in only one of the years the authors studied. Poe, Tate, and Keith (1999) note that the similarities Mitchell and McCormick find are “impressive given the differences in design: their use of two dimensions of repression as dependent variables, their not using a lagged dependent variable (as we had), and the necessity of their using smaller (cross-sectional) samples of countries [which] led to much larger standard errors in their reanalysis, making statistical significance more difficult to achieve, a factor that accounts for several of their divergent findings” (299). Poe, Tate, and Keith also raised theoretical concerns about analyzing the components of repression separately, because doing so does not take into account that the behaviors are substitutable policy options, and the fact that the choice to use one tool may either prevent or render unnecessary the use of the other (see Most and Starr 1989, 97–132). For example, killing one’s political opponents eliminates the need to imprison them. Disappearance may also be substitutable for imprisonment and may in many cases actually hide murder. I continue to conceptualize repression of personal integrity rights as a unidimensional phenomenon. As we will see below, Cingranelli and Richards’ (1999b) Mokken scaling of their nine-point physical integrity rights index strongly suggests that this subset of rights is indeed unidimensional.

Measuring Repression

Social scientists seeking to measure state repression or coercive action empirically face significant measurement issues similar to those that challenge all large-N cross-national studies. Mitchell et al. (1986) provide an accurate summary of the challenge: data sets must “(1) have broad coverage across countries and time, (2) be based on multiple sources, (3) be reliable and valid, (4) have intensiveness (depth of coverage), (5) have extensiveness of coverage (multiple indicators), and (6) be sensitive to differences across countries and time” (22). Measurements must capture the scope (the degree of potential harm inflicted), the intensity (frequency and concentration of occurrence), and the range (size and type of target population) of the repression (14–16). The two earliest popular measurements of political repression, Taylor and Jodice’s (1983) State Coercive Behavior (part of The World Handbook of Political and Social Science Indicators) and Freedom House’s Civil Liberties Index, represent significant data-collection efforts, but each fails to some degree to meet these criteria, as I will demonstrate below. Most empirical studies to date, however, have primarily addressed the more severe form of repression, violations of personal integrity (imprisonment, torture, killing, and disappearances) (for example, Poe and Tate 1994; Poe, Tate, and Keith 1999; Cingranelli and Richards 1999a, 1999b; Keith 2002a), and have tended to employ the dominant indicators in the field: the Political Terror Scale (PTS) or the (CIRI) physical integrity rights measures, both of which I believe come much closer to meeting the criteria set forth by Mitchell et al. (1986) than do the two early measures of civil liberties restrictions. The Political Terror Scale was originally developed by Stohl and others (Stohl and Carleton 1985; Gibney and Stohl 1988; Poe 1992; Gibney and Dalton 1996) and is maintained by Mark Gibney (Gibney 2011).

The two standards-based PTS measures are based on assessments contained in the yearly human rights country reports published by Amnesty International and the U.S. Department of State in regard to the occurrence of political imprisonment, execution, disappearances, and torture. The ordered indices range from 1 to 5. The coding categories and their criteria are:

(1) Countries [are] under a secure rule of law, people are not imprisoned for their views, and torture is rare or exceptional…. Political murders are extremely rare.

(2) There is a limited amount of imprisonment for nonviolent activity. However, few persons are affected, torture and beating are exceptional…. Political murder is rare.

(3) There is extensive political imprisonment, or a recent history of such imprisonment. Execution or other political murders and brutality may be common. Unlimited detention, with or without trial, for political views is accepted.

(4) The practices of level 31 are expanded to larger numbers. Murders, disappearances are a common part of life…. In spite of its generality, on this level terror affects primarily those who interest themselves in politics or ideas.

(5) The terrors of level 41 have been expanded to the whole population…. The leaders of these societies place no limits on the means or thoroughness with which they pursue personal or ideological goals. (Gastil 1980, 37, as quoted in Carleton and Stohl 1985, 212–13)¹

While the two measures are highly correlated (.81 in the data set here), the country coverage varies. The country coverage in the Department of State-based measure reflects the universal set of independent states, except in a couple of the early years under study here.² The measure based on Amnesty International reports is less complete because, as a human rights NGO, its mission has been to respond to human rights abuse, and thus it has tended to focus on states with problematic human rights records (Poe and Tate 1994, 869; Poe, Carey, and Vazquez 2001, 655–56). Specifically, the Department of State–based measure tends to cover 20 to 40 more states than the one based on the Amnesty International reports. In previous work we wanted to take advantage of having two measures based on different reports of human rights, so we dealt with this issue of uneven country coverage by substituting Department of State scores for the missing scores in the Amnesty International–based data, and vice versa for the less frequently missing State Department–based data (Poe and Tate 1994; Poe, Tate, and Keith 1999; Keith, Tate, and Poe 2009). I continue this practice here, and I conduct parallel analyses with each of the political terror scales.

Cingranelli and Richards (1999b) have created another measure that is useful in capturing the level of state repression. Their physical integrity rights measures are somewhat similar to Gibney and Stohl’s Political Terror Scale, but four components of repression (imprisonment, torture, disappearances, and killings) are measured separately on a three-point scale that captures the frequency of violations: frequent (fifty or more) violations (0), some (one to fifty) violations (1), and no violations (2). The authors note that their categories rest on events-based criteria whenever possible: countries with 50 of more confirmed violations are scored zero; countries with less than 50 violations but than zero confirmed violations are scored one; and countries with no violations are scored two. A brief description of the variables follows (for the fuller description see http://ciri.binghamton.edu/documentation.asp).

Disappearance: Disappearances are cases in which people have disappeared, political motivation appears likely, and the victims have not been found. Knowledge of the whereabouts of the disappeared is, by definition, not public knowledge. However, while there is typically no way of knowing where victims are, it is typically known by whom they were taken and under what circumstances. A score of 0 indicates that disappearances have occurred frequently in a given year; a score of 1 indicates that disappearances occasionally occurred; and a score of 2 indicates that disappearances did not occur in a given year.

Extrajudicial Killing: Extrajudicial killings are killings by government officials without due process of law. They include murders by private groups if instigated by government. These killings may result from the deliberate, illegal, and excessive use of lethal force by the police, security forces, or other agents of the state whether against criminal suspects, detainees, prisoners, or others. A score of 0 indicates that extrajudicial killings were practiced frequently in a given year; a score of 1 indicates that extrajudicial killings were practiced occasionally; and a score of 2 indicates that such killings did not occur in a given year.

Political Imprisonment: Political imprisonment refers to the incarceration of people by government officials because of: their speech; their nonviolent opposition to government policies or leaders; their religious beliefs; their nonviolent religious practices, including proselytizing; or their membership in a group, including an ethnic or racial group. A score of 0 indicates that there were many people imprisoned because of their religious, political, or other beliefs in a given year; a score of 1 indicates that a few people were imprisoned; and a score of 2 indicates that no persons were imprisoned for any of the above reasons in a given year.

Torture: Torture refers to the purposeful inflicting of extreme pain, whether mental or physical, by government officials or by private individuals at the instigation of government officials. Torture includes the use of physical and other force by police and prison guards that is cruel, inhuman, or degrading. This also includes deaths in custody due to negligence by government officials. A score of 0 indicates that torture was practiced frequently in a given year; a score of 1 indicates that torture was practiced occasionally; and a score of 2 indicates that torture did not occur in a given year. (http://ciri.binghamton.edu/documentation/ciri_variables_short_descriptions.pdf)