What is Democracy? (36): Less Repression

In previous posts in this series, I made the theoretical argument in favor of a strong link between democracy and human rights (see here, here and here). In a paper called “Measuring the Democracy-Repression Nexus“, David A. Armstrong makes the quantitative argument. At least he does so for a subset of human rights, namely physical integrity rights or security rights, such as extrajudicial executions, disappearances, torture etc. The violation of these rights is usually called “state repression”.

He finds that democracies are less likely to violate the physical integrity rights of their citizens. Democratic institutions and behavior limit a state’s repressive tendencies, but only when there is a certain level of democracy. A dictatorial government becoming a bit less dictatorial (for example by way of token elections) produces only a very small decrease in repression.

So this is an example of the threshold model I described here. This is a graph from the paper:

influence of democracy on state repression