Who's Minding the Locals? Decentralization, Diversity, and Political Conflict in European Democracies.

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 ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]