| ID | 133949 |
| Title Proper | Empirical evaluation of explanations for state repression |
| Language | ENG |
| Author | Hill, Daniel W ; Jones, Zachary M |
| Publication | 2014. |
| Summary / Abstract (Note) | The empirical literature that examines cross-national patterns of state repression seeks to discover a set of political, economic, and social conditions that are consistently associated with government violations of human rights. Null hypothesis significance testing is the most common way of examining the relationship between repression and concepts of interest, but we argue that it is inadequate for this goal, and has produced potentially misleading results. To remedy this deficiency in the literature we use cross-validation and random forests to determine the predictive power of measures of concepts the literature identifies as important causes of repression. We find that few of these measures are able to substantially improve the predictive power of statistical models of repression. Further, the most studied concept in the literature, democratic political institutions, predicts certain kinds of repression much more accurately than others. We argue that this is due to conceptual and operational overlap between democracy and certain kinds of state repression. Finally, we argue that the impressive performance of certain features of domestic legal systems, as well as some economic and demographic factors, justifies a stronger focus on these concepts in future studies of repression. |
| `In' analytical Note | American Political Science Review Vol.108, No.3; Aug.2014: p.661-687 |
| Journal Source | American Political Science Review Vol.108, No.3; Aug.2014: p.661-687 |
| Key Words | Political Condition ; Economic Condition ; Social Condition ; Military Condition ; Political Violence ; Human Rights ; Democracy ; Economic Factor ; Demographical Factor ; Legal System ; Operational Overlap ; Random Forests ; Predictive Power ; Democratic Political Institutions - DPI |