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The paper adopts a rational-institutional approach to explain why federal and unitary institutional designs influence the level of state coercion and targeting practices of police in democratic states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explains the structure of state responses to political dissidents. This article explains that federal institutional arrangements independently account for different levels of respect for civil and political rights in democracies. It explains why restrictions of civil and political rights in federal democracies will be higher and more variable across other units. It also reviews current research on repression and implications for the argument that federalism is important for explaining why levels of repression emerge in federal democracies.

This paper examines how government and dissident groups respond to each other in the context of a secessionist attempt. We apply game theoretic analysis to explore the interaction of government tactics with the strategies of regional Radicals and Moderates. The results indicate that the government will target of Radicals in order to undermine the unity of the groups. The model?s results are tested empirically using the conflict between the Spanish government and the Basques and also using the case of separatist efforts in Northern Ireland. We compare the likelihood of government targeting and dissident protest over time using events-data collected for Spain, from 1980-1995 and for Northern Ireland from 1980 ? 1995. The empirical results suggest that, as hypothesized, targeting of Radicals will not increase Moderate protest. Moderates only join in dissent when they are targeted with repression, and in some cases, when targeted with violence by pro-state radical groups, as revealed in the analysis of Northern Ireland. Hence, a divide and conquer strategy exists and can be effective in reducing but not eliminating dissent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The determinants of political democratization have long been debated within the social sciences, the media and among those concerned with public policy. We introduce a new explanatory variable into this discussion and suggest a different way for examining causal relationships. Specifically, we consider the impact of state repression on regime change and examine its influence within the context of a vector autoregression (VAR) model. This research allows us to assess the importance of not only repression and several other variables believed to be relevant but it also allows us to explore the existence of reciprocal relationships as well as lagged influences. From the results, we find that state repression does influence the likelihood of democratization, both positively and negatively dependent upon how far back into the past one considers. Additionally, we discover a complex set of relationships involving democratization, repression, democracy and domestic protest. The investigation has implications for not only how we study democratization but also how we go about understanding politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses differences that persist in extant studies overhow human rights violations and state repression are conceptualized.This has resulted in the development of a sometimes compartmentalizedbody of knowledge that in fact shares much in common: an interest inexplaining what causes state violations of human rights. The paperbrings together conceptual threads connecting several literatures to layout a framework for how human rights violations may be systematicallyclassified based on 1) what is directly violated, and 2) the immediaterange of targets (individual or groups). The resulting scheme willassist us in our operational efforts to better measure and subsequentlyanalyze causal influences on human rights violations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that greater institutional decentralization, especially under conditions of political and social diversity, increases opportunities for police repression of protesters and civil and political rights violations overall. Differences are attributed to the level of autonomy and power sharing between national and subnational governments (vertical relations). This argument is tested on a sample of nineteen European countries to determine institutional effects on overall human rights performance (1981 - 2004). Next analysis is done to determine individual level effects of protest on repressive policing in a cross-national sample of daily level contentious events in five European countries with either federal or unitary arrangements: Germany, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Bulgaria, and Poland, from 1990 - 1995. Results for the sixteen year time series suggest that more decentralized institutional arrangements have a slight negative impact on overall respect for civil and political rights. At the daily level, we find a similar trend across the five countries, where presence of local direct elections tends to increase the magnitude of repressive policing at protest events. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I explain why disaggregating measures of political conflict generated from news-sources helps explain changes in frequency rates of protest and repression before, during, and after democratization in Poland and Czechoslovakia. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will argue that federal and decentralized institutional arrangements help explain different levels of protest and repression within and across post-communist states. Using a rational-institutional approach, the paper explains why authorities in more decentralized systems may be more or less constrained in how they respond to dissent, based on local policies adopted that reflect the demographic interests of the local population as well as communist legacies related to ethnic majority/minority tensions. Decentralization is expected to yield greater variation within the sampled post-communist states and across protest groups (ethnic, political, and class-based), while more centrally constituted systems exhibit less variation across municipalities and certain protest groups (e.g., ethnic). Using negative binomial regression, I test whether more decentralization results in greater variation of policing intensity against protest groups, with events data on a cross-national sample of daily level domestic conflict events across five post-communist states: Czechoslovakia (1990 ? 1992), Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Bulgaria, from 1990 ? 1995. An important implication of this research is greater understanding of the conditions under which post-communist states face prospects for successful (peaceful) outcomes versus conflict escalation. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]