Research framework and broader academic knowledge base
Serbia: documented application of the same framework
When does punishment frighten people, and when does it provoke even greater resistance?
Punishment more often scares people when it is quiet, directed at a few carefully chosen people and manages to separate them from colleagues, family and public support. Then others see a high price, but they do not see a wide enough injustice that they would easily gather around.
Pressure can cause more resistance when it is clearly disproportionate, affects many people at once, violates the widely accepted norm or merges groups that have not cooperated before. Public recording or symbolic sacrifice can change the way people interpret the event and reduce the fear of loneliness. There is no, however, the same rule for every country and moment. The government often intensifies the punishment because the resistance is already growing, so to understand the causes, the correct order of reaction is crucial.
Research does not find the same outcome. The government often increases the pressure precisely because the resistance is growing, so it is difficult to separate what is the cause and what is the answer.
Works supporting this answer, with their evidence type and an explanation of how they relate to the claim.
review more research
Davenport, C. (2007), „State Repression and Political Order“, Annual Review of Political Science 10: 1–23.
- Contribution to this answer
- Davenport’s review shows why one of the oldest issues of repression research is still open: coercion can increase the price of opposition and deter people, but it can also produce new reasons for anger and mobilization. The outcome depends on the type of repression, political threat, institutions and context in which it is applied.
Explain how the system works
Ritter, E. H. i Conrad, C. R. (2016), „Preventing and Responding to Dissent: The Observational Challenges of Explaining Strategic Repression“, American Political Science Review 110(1): 85–99.
- Contribution to this answer
- Ritter and Conrad show why this effect is so difficult to measure: repression and protest affect each other in advance. If preventive repression succeeds, people who would protest never show up in the data; those who do get out are often exactly the groups that the previous threat failed to deter.
research that checks more closely what the cause is
Wasow, O. (2020), „Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion, and Voting“, American Political Science Review 114(3): 638–659.
- Contribution to this answer
- Wasow shows one concrete way in which repression can produce political backfires: nonviolent protests by the American civil rights movement, especially when they encountered state or Vigilant repression, shifted media attention and public opinion towards civil rights. When protesters used violence themselves, attention shifted instead towards order and control.
review more research
Earl, J. i Braithwaite, J. M. (2022), „Layers of Political Repression: Integrating Research on Social Movement Repression“, Annual Review of Law and Social Science 18: 227–248.
- Contribution to this answer
- Earl and Braithwaite warn that the question of “does repression work” hides many different things: different types of repression, the actor who carries it out, the target, the legal context and the type of damage it does. That is why the opposite findings from different studies can not simply be gathered as if they had studied the same intervention.
data from a large number of countries
Bhasin, T. i Gandhi, J. (2013), „Timing and Targeting of State Repression in Authoritarian Elections“, Electoral Studies 32(4): 620–631.
- Contribution to this answer
- Bhasin and Gandhi show that the government itself counts on the political price of repression: before the elections, it avoids widespread violence against voters, whose support it still needs, and redirects the repression towards opposition leaders and activists. This shows that repression has a political cost, but does not test the work directly when it increases future protest.
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