State Repression and the Domestic Democratic Peace

Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics

by Christian A. Davenport

Does democracy reduce state repression as human rights activism, funding, and policy suggest? What are the limitations of this argument? Investigating 137 countries from 1976 to 1996, State Repression and the Domestic Democratic Peace seeks to shed light on these questions. Specifically, it finds that electoral participation and competition generally reduces personal integrity violations like torture and mass killing; other aspects of democracy do not wield consistent influences. This negative influence can be overwhelmed by conflict, however, and thus there are important qualifications for the peace proposition.

Genres: Political Science, Nonfiction

254 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Christian Davenport PhD is best known as a scholar of state repression/human rights violation, genocide, civil war, social movements and protest having written 8 books and approximately 50+ academic articles. While his work mainly concerns global patterns, he has also done research on specific countries as well including the United States (social movements, protest, protest policing and state repression, the Black Power Movement), Rwanda (genocide and civil war), India (untouchability) and Northern Ireland (the Conflict or Troubles). Innovative databases derived from archival sources as well as content analyses are affiliated with both sets of research. Davenport is generally viewed as being one of the founding scholars regarding the quantitative examination of state repression/human rights violation as well as one of the earliest scholars to engage in what has become an effort to explore sub-national, disaggregated, organizational as well as individual-level dynamics within conflict and contention. While most of his research has been concerned with explaining onset, variation and lethality, newer work has moved to explain termination as well as consequences/legacies/outcomes.