The Effects of Selective and Indiscriminate Repression on the 2013 Gezi Park Nonviolent Resistance Campaign

We investigate the differential effects of selective and indiscriminate repression on the rate of protest actions during the nonviolent resistance campaign in Gezi Park, Turkey, in 2013. After deriving theoretical expectations about how and why these forms of repression will influence protest actions, we test them with protest event data that were collected from a major local newspaper and subsequently validated through a comparison with two other independent Twitter datasets. Utilizing a Poisson autoregressive estimation model, we find that selective repression, as measured by the number of arrested activists who were detained while they were not demonstrating, decreased the rate of protest actions. Meanwhile, indiscriminate repression, as measured by the frequency of the government’s use of lethal and nonlethal violence against protesters during demonstrations, increased the rate of protest actions. Our findings support prior research on the influence of indiscriminate repression on backfire outcomes. They also provide evidence for the impact of selective repression on movement demobilization through the removal of opposition activists. Finally, the targeted arrest strategy of selective repression that was employed in the Gezi campaign has implications for the feasibility of the strategic incapacitation model of protest policing

Different paths to the modern state in Europe: the interaction between domestic political economy and interstate competition

Theoretical work on state formation and capacity has focused mostly on early modern Europe and on the experience of western European states during this period. While a number of European states monopolized domestic tax collection and achieved gains in state capacity during the early modern era, for others revenues stagnated or even declined, and these variations motivated alternative hypotheses for determinants of fiscal and state capacity. In this study we test the basic hypotheses in the existing literature making use of the large date set we have compiled for all of the leading states across the continent. We find strong empirical support for two prevailing threads in the literature, arguing respectively that interstate wars and changes in economic structure towards an urbanized economy had positive fiscal impact. Regarding the main point of contention in the theoretical literature, whether it was representative or authoritarian political regimes that facilitated the gains in fiscal capacity, we do not find conclusive evidence that one performed better than the other. Instead, the empirical evidence we have gathered lends supports to the hypothesis that when under pressure of war, the fiscal performance of representative regimes was better in the more urbanized-commercial economies and the fiscal performance of authoritarian regimes was better in rural-agrarian economie

The Great Powers and Global Struggle, 1490-1990

In The Great Powers and Global Struggle, Karen A. Rasler and William R. Thompson focus on two themes: the rise and fall as well as the relative decline of major world powers over the past five hundred years, and the way in which these processes have set the stage for the outbreak of global war. Their interdisciplinary approach encompasses political science, economics, sociology, geography, and history. The most significant wars occur when regional leaders—historically in Western Europe—challenge global leaders. By studying the wars of Napoleon, Louis XIV, Phillip II and the Italian/Indian Ocean wars of the sixteenth century through World Wars I and II to the present, the authors challenge the long-held idea that prosperity leads to over-consumption and underinvestment and thus decline—a theory, traceable to ancient times, that remains the principal explanation for global decline today. Arguments about global structural change and its implications abound, but rarely is the abstract translated into concrete historical terms with emphases on specific actors and empirical documentation. Rasler and Thompson reinterpret the past five hundred years of major-power warfare and provide extensive tests of the eighteen generalizations critical to their argument. They conclude that those who argue that global war and repositioning are no longer a concern among the major powers lack critical understanding of the behavior that contributes to such conflict. Karen A. Rasler is associate professor of political science at Indiana University. William R. Thompson is professor of political science at Indiana University. Rasler and Thompson\u27s analysis is unique among long cycle theorists because of their concentration on the role of rising regional leaders in the cycle of concentration-deconcentration-reconcentration in the distribution of power in the international system. —Choicehttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_european_history/1009/thumbnail.jp

Borders, Rivalry, Democracy, and Conflict in the European Region, 1816-1994

Should peace be attributed mainly to democracy or to some intervening variable that influences both democracy and conflict? A second, perhaps related question is whether or to what extent democratization is driven by external drivers of threat. If regime type helps explain external conflict, does external conflict also help explain regime type? By examining the relationships among strategic rivalry, unstable boundaries, democracy, and interstate conflict in a regional context, we find that rivalry and unstable boundaries are alternative manifestations of external threat. Both have significant, if not identical effects on stimulating interstate conflict. Regime type does not appear to have an independent effect on interstate conflict when we take either rivalries or unstable boundaries into consideration. At the same time, we also find that external threat indicators negatively predict changes in democratization. In short, greater threat is associated with less democratization.borders, democratization, interstate conflict, rivalry, Western Europe

Replication data for: Contested Territory, Strategic Rivalries and Conflict Escalation

After bringing together independent information on contested territory, rivalries, and conflict escalation (militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) and war), we examine the timing of the temporal ordering of these three processes. Contrary to conventional expectations, we find the contested territory-militarized dispute-rivalry ordering to be rare. Rivalries and contested territory often begin at the same time. Next, after setting up a unified model, we find the triadic combination of contested territory, contiguity, and strategic rivalry to be a strong explanatory combination for MIDs and war over time (1919–1992). We also control for other explanatory factors such as mixed regime type and major power status. These findings provide strong support for arguments such as Vasquez's steps-to-war theory that specify these sources of conflict escalation

How Rivalries End- Ch. 1: The Problem of Rivalry De-escalation and Termination

The demise of the Cold War caught many, if not all, observers and participants alike by surprise. For much of the time between the end of World War II and the late 1980s/early 1990s, analysts and policymakers alike assumed that the East-West structural cleavage in world politics would remain unvarying. This cleavage was so paramount that it permeated and influenced world politics at all levels. In fact, for many observers every competition appeared, rightly or wrongly, as if it were a proxy struggle for the U.S.-Soviet rivalry. Then, abruptly, the central cleavage no longer existed. As a consequence, analysts and decision makers alike lost their conceptual anchor for deciphering how the world worked. The "world still worked," but a basic key to unlocking the secrets of how it worked had disappeared for good

2009) Watchdog or lapdog? Media freedom, regime type and government respect for human rights

Abstract A main justification for press freedom is that free media will act as a watchdog over the government. While we would expect democracies to have free media and autocracies to have government-controlled media, some democracies have government-controlled media, and some autocracies have free media. How this mismatch between regime type and media system influences government behavior is a puzzle worth exploring. One of the most widely criticized government behaviors is the violation of physical integrity rights. The question posed here is, how does media freedom affect government respect for these rights? In this paper, I theorize that the relationship between media freedom and government respect for human rights differs, depending on the presence of democratic institutions. The paper's findings support my premise. Specifically, the influence of media freedom on government respect for human rights is negative for the most autocratic regimes and positive for only the most democratic regimes