The link between democracy and repression is a topic that interests me particularly. In fact, after studying and assessing (or trying to assess) democracy in Southern Latin America in the first paper, I realized that electoral democracy does not always move together with civil liberties. Therefore I was really curious to know the results of empirical assessments on the question of democracy as a vector of pacification.
By reading Zanger and Davenport on that subject I realized again that it was all a matter of definition. Both of them acknowledge the negative relationship between democracy and repression. However, whereas Zanger has a “restricted” definition of repression, defined as the “violation of life integrity rights”, Davenport as a more “maximalist” definition, disaggregating “repression into violent (personal integrity violations) and non-or less-violent activities (restrictions of political/civil liberties) (p.543).
This difference of definition results in different causal results. Democracy appears to be a barrier against violent repression but no as much when considering restrictions of political and civil liberties. However, Davenport reaches this conclusion by defining Democracy in a very very narrow way. In fact he uses only one component of the already minimalist definition of democracy by Polity, the constraints on the executive.
I completely understand the choice of a minimalist definition. As explained by Zanger, “when correlating democracy with a human rights measure, such as the Political Terror Scale, it is more appropriate to use a measure that employs only institutional characteristics. In including the respect for civil rights as an indicator for democracy, the measure of the dependent and independent variable might interfere with each other”. This is even more the case because measures like Freedom House lack of transparency and it would be impossible to disaggregate the measures in order to have only certain components.
However, I wonder, in the case of Davenport, if he would have achieved the same results with another definition of democracy, one that would not be a “diminished subtype”. In fact, it is not maybe the constraints on the executive that is the dimension of democracy that pacifies the most. The level of participation, as well as the nature of the electoral system, the independence of the judiciary, the strength of the legislature, the fact that it is a presidential vs. a parliamentary democracy, etc. I haven’t thought about it enough but intuitively I would question the choice of such a narrow definition of democracy to assess the causal relationship between democracy and internal peace.
It seems like authors can argue for any type of relationships depending on the definition of the concepts they chose. However, there is a fundamental finding, that seems to be recurrent and encouraging for the spread of democracy, is that it seems to reduce high levels of violence and killings against civilians. And even if it is not “enough” in terms of what we usually pretend democracy can achieve, it is already something that can build a strong faith in this type of regime.
Again there are some nuances that should not be ignored, depending on other factors, such as previous experiences of repression, and wars etc. that also influence the more or less peaceful state of a country. Let’s say that, ceteris paribus, “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried” – Winston Churchill
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