One of the most consistent findings, to date, in the human rights literature asserts that democracy decreases the likelihood of state repression. Several studies have noted the pacifying effects of democratic norms, competitive elections, and institutional checks on the executive as aspects that make democracies less repressive. However, the basic dichotomous measures that are commonly used in the literature only capture the presence or absence of these democratic characteristics and cannot account for the variation that exists between countries within these democratic institutions. In this paper, I suggest that electoral outcomes resulting from variation in institutional choice may have certain implications for a state's likelihood of using repression; one such electoral outcome is disproportionality. I argue that the level of consensuality of a democracy, represented as vote to seat disproportionality, should have different implications for state repression depending on how secure the government officials feel in their political survival. Using paneled data I create an ordered logit model and find that when job insecurity is high, high levels of disproportionality will encourage the most extreme levels of repression. However, when job insecurity is low, majoritarian systems are more likely to not repress their citizens.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-04112016-142944 |
| Date | 05 May 2016 |
| Creators | Kenny, Tonya |
| Contributors | Garand, James, Potter, Joshua, Sullivan, Christopher |
| Publisher | LSU |
| Source Sets | Louisiana State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-04112016-142944/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached herein a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below and in appropriate University policies, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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