At face value, this week’s readings seem examine a relationship which I would have described as self-evident, logical, obvious… a ‘given.’ The general consensus has always been that democracies are less repressive and less likely to violate human right than their authoritarian counterparts; the question that remains is, thus, whether or not this relationship is a causal one or simply correlative. Neither the Zanger nor the Davenport and Armstrong pieces fully address this question, but they do both try to explicate the nature of the correlation quite well, the first with specific focus on transitional regimes,  and the latter aggregating different ‘democracy’ measures in order to examine the relationship at different ‘levels’ of democracy.

Zanger’s approach is unique; in trying to better understand the correlation between regime type and repression she looks at the effect of regime change on life integrity violations. In this way, she addresses the question of correlation vs. causation better than Davenport and Armstrong do. There are, however, a number of methodological weaknesses with her analysis. One concern I had was with her ‘anocracy’ classification of regimes. It was very loosely defined as an ‘incoherent regime;’ basically anything that was not a democracy or an autocracy. The lack of a rigorous definition translates to her operationalization of the ‘regime change’ concept. Using the Polity III dataset, she gives the classification of ‘anocracy’ to all regimes receiving scores between -3 and +3, but provides no substantial justification for this arbitrary grouping arrangement.

Davenport and Armstrong’s article provided more robust findings. They were concerned with explicating the relationship between democracy and domestic peace, which is often characterized as negative and linear. Specifically, they wanted to see if the ‘level’ of democracy affected the level of repression within a state. I found their results quite compelling; they found that a threshold model best explained the relationship between democracy and domestic peace. This model posits that “below a certain level, democracy has no effect on human rights violations, but above this level democracy influences repression in a negative and roughly linear manner” (Davenport and Armstrong 2004: 538).