Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences

Why Do Governments Abuse Human Rights?

Item

Title

Why Do Governments Abuse Human Rights?

Author

Moore, Will H.

Welch, Ryan M.

Research Area

Social Institutions

Topic

Government Systems

Abstract

Because the abuse of human beings is abhorrent, we normatively expect governments to respect those rights. However, throughout human history, abuse of human begins has been the norm. Governments abuse rights because doing so helps leaders exercise, expand, or retain their power. Normatively, this is troubling. Yet, as a positive matter, it should not be surprising. We begin the essay explaining why this is so, and then turn to the question that broadly captures the research agendas of those studying the topic of human rights: how can people constrain Leviathan? Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, several foundational studies helped establish a generally agreed on account that governments respond to dissent with coercion. Domestically, democracy and economic output both reduce rights abuses, while large populations increase repression. The impact of international characteristics is less well developed. In fact, what is known is that the international human right regime is complex and that norms, treaties, and international courts do not have a consistent effect on a countrys' respect for rights. Researchers are now studying complex relationships between domestic and international factors. For instance, the domestic judiciary of a country influences the extent to which human rights treaties constrain government abuse of rights. Over the coming decade, we expect scholars to produce considerable new knowledge about the impact of norms, treaties, and international courts on the states' (lack of) respect for human rights.

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Identifier

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extracted text

Why Do Governments
Abuse Human Rights?
WILL H. MOORE and RYAN M. WELCH

Abstract
Because the abuse of human beings is abhorrent, we normatively expect governments to respect those rights. However, throughout human history, abuse of human
begins has been the norm. Governments abuse rights because doing so helps leaders exercise, expand, or retain their power. Normatively, this is troubling. Yet, as
a positive matter, it should not be surprising. We begin the essay explaining why
this is so, and then turn to the question that broadly captures the research agendas
of those studying the topic of human rights: how can people constrain Leviathan?
Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, several foundational studies helped establish
a generally agreed on account that governments respond to dissent with coercion.
Domestically, democracy and economic output both reduce rights abuses, while large
populations increase repression. The impact of international characteristics is less
well developed. In fact, what is known is that the international human right regime
is complex and that norms, treaties, and international courts do not have a consistent effect on a countrys’ respect for rights. Researchers are now studying complex
relationships between domestic and international factors. For instance, the domestic
judiciary of a country influences the extent to which human rights treaties constrain
government abuse of rights. Over the coming decade, we expect scholars to produce
considerable new knowledge about the impact of norms, treaties, and international
courts on the states’ (lack of) respect for human rights.

INTRODUCTION
Given that governments own a monopoly on the legitimate use of force
within their borders, it should not surprise us that since its inception,
the states have not only repressed some of those who live within their
sovereignty claim, but have routinely done so. Yet, the dominant narrative,
especially in societies governed by democracy, is that governments do not
abuse people. It is critical to point out that this is a normative expectation,
not a positive statement about the state of the world. As human beings,
we appear to be innately inclined to tune out abuse and murder of human
beings by the government, despite the fact that, as Rummel (1994) has
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

documented, the government is the top-ranked human institution for killing
human beings. Further, as the international human rights movement has
grown, in fits and starts, from its birth during the enlightenment to become
normatively dominant since the 1970s (e.g., Hunt, 2007; Keck & Sikkink,
1998; Lauren, 1998; Tsutsui &Wotipka, 2004), governments have shifted
from being open about their abuse to actively denying and hiding it.1 The
result is that there is a remarkable disconnect between facts (governments
routinely abuse and even kill) and norms (governments must respect human
rights). We begin with a brief explanation of what human rights are, and
then explain why we should not be surprised that governments routinely
abuse them.
Acknowledging human rights means to limit the extent of the government’s ability to use coercion; examples of violations include torture,
arbitrary imprisonment and killing, genocide, spying, and harassment.2
Historically, human society became ruled by governments that spanned
considerable territory and large populations when individuals asserted a
sovereign right to govern and had both the coercive and administrative
capacity to (more or less) effectively enforce that claim. The enlightenment
period’s writings about a social contract between people and the ruler (e.g.,
Hobbes [1651] 1991; Locke [1689] 1960; Rousseau [1762] 1997) was a reaction
to that status quo, and it cannot be underemphasized how revolutionary
were those ideas. Yet, we rarely appreciated that the social contract, as presented by Hobbes, for example, implicitly views the ruler as a sort of referee
who is granted a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercion to adjudicate
disputes among people, without concern to adjudication of disputes between
people and the state. The creation of an institution that both exercises power
and has the sole authority to denude people of property, arrest, incarcerate,
try and judge, and even execute them is remarkable; yet, that is at the core
of the social contract. If such an institution is powerful enough to enforce its
claims to the above, and the human beings who exercise authority on behalf
of the state are conventional human beings susceptible to the shortcomings
to which we know human beings are susceptible, then it would be curious
indeed if abuse of human beings by government was rare. By this account,
the question shifts from the normatively driven query to a positive one: how
can human beings constrain Leviathan (Moore, 2010)? The international
human rights regime has been constructed to precisely perform that.
Though the United Nations General Assembly declared the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948, decades passed before social
1. This is most apparent in the domain of torture (Rejali, 2007).
2. This essay focuses on what are called “physical integrity of the person” rights, or “first generation”
rights. Economic, social, and cultural rights also exist, and are sometimes referred to as second and third
generation rights. Wikipedia entries, and other similar resources, provide serviceable overviews.

Why Do Governments Abuse Human Rights?

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scientists began to study human rights violations and the effort to limit them.
Since the 1980s, however, there has been fruitful research that has led to a
number of accepted reasons for why some governments violate rights less
than others. This essay is designed to navigate the reader through the status
of current theory and findings, research that is presently being conducted,
and the direction in which the field is, and can be, headed. The rest of the
essay proceeds as follows. The following section reviews the foundational
work and its findings. From there, we explore the current state of human
rights research and how scholars have addressed some of the challenges state
repression researchers face. Lastly, we identify unresolved challenges and
suggest some directions in which future research may go.
WHAT WE KNOW
The research that has explored human rights violations in the last few
decades has yielded some results that have come to be regarded as generally
accepted. These have largely existed in two separate realms: domestic and
international factors. Some of the most cutting-edge research considers
both of these domains and their interactions, and we review it below. In
this section, we identify the few consensuses that exist in the literature. We
then discuss the domestic factors known to influence how states conduct
themselves with respect to their citizens. Following that, we review some of
the international factors that are foundational.
DOMESTIC FACTORS THAT AFFECT STATE REPRESSION
In two recent reviews, Christian Davenport usefully summarizes what we
know about the domestic sources that influence governments’ propensity to
repress (Davenport, 2007a; Davenport & Inman, 2012). The first is the behavior of those who using means that the government does not view as legitimate
to challenge policy and/or the government’s authority: dissident activity.
The second is the structures in which both the dissidents and the government
act: political institutions, macroeconomic performance, and the characteristics of the population.
Behavior: Domestic Challenges to Power. On average, states respond with coercion to challenges that they deem illegitimate: they arrest, ban, disappear,
harass, imprison, kill, and torture. Whether the dissent is illegitimate varies
across countries and with the (potential) consequences of the dissent. For
instance, some countries are more amenable to peaceful protest than others,
although even a tolerant country will resort to more coercion if that peaceful

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

movement begins to challenge the government authority in a major way. All
states view violent dissent as illegitimate, and with few exceptions it is met
with coercion. In addition, some states engage in active repression to deter
dissent: it becomes a defining feature of governance as under Stalin (e.g.,
Gregory, 2009). Thus, while the behavior of dissidents generates coercion in
all states, researchers turn to political institutions, macroeconomic performance, and population characteristics to explain both why dissident–state
interactions vary across countries and why some states actively repress in
the absence of dissent.
Political Institutions. Political institutions—how people acquire power and
how power is distributed across the government—shape the behavior of
leaders and the dissidents who would challenge them. The institution
that has drawn greatest interest is democracy, which can be defined thinly
(rule by the people) or thickly (separation of powers and civil liberties).
Davenport (2007b) reports the existence of a domestic democratic peace,
showing that elections (voice) and separation of powers (veto) each reduce
the extent to which governments turn to repression as a tool. Others have
extended the argument to civil liberties such as freedom of assembly and
speech (Little, n.d). Lastly, some work focuses on parchment institutions,
such as the provisions included in the constitution (Keith, Tate, & Poe, 2009).
Put in broad terms, democracy is best understood as a set of institutions that
alter the incentives of government officials, and Cingranelli and Filippov
(2010) provide an excellent study that shows how various characteristics of
electoral systems influence the incentives of elected officials to respect rights.
The work on the domestic democratic peace can be viewed more broadly
within the context of what is known as Selectorate Theory (Bueno de Mesquita,
Smith, Siverson, & Morrow, 2003), which argues that the defining feature of
political institutions is the proportion of the population that the leader must
keep satisfied to ensure continued tenure in office. As that number shrinks,
the state will be less constrained by a formal separation of powers, other portions of the constitution, and less concerned about succeeding in free and
fair elections. As a consequence, they will become more willing to abuse and
repress members of the population who are not members of the group they
must satisfy to remain in office.
This work begins to provide an answer to our query about tethering
Leviathan. Note that the executive branch of government is responsible for
state security, and that the military and police report to the executive. As
such, the executive is the branch of government that represses. To constrain
Leviathan, then, we must begin by making the executive accountable to as
broad a portion of society as possible via free and fair elections, separating

Why Do Governments Abuse Human Rights?

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powers, and extending civil liberties. Note that each of these reinforces the
others: power needs to be separated to make it difficult for any actor to
rule by appealing to a small number of people; civil liberties are needed
to permit political mobilization, so that elections might be free and fair;
elections are needed to give the executive an incentive not to accumulate
power by closing other branches; and so on. Part of the answer, then, is that
political institutions can help people constrain Leviathan. As it turns out,
however, there is more we can say.
Scholarly interest in another domestic institution, the national human
rights institution (NHRI), has recently emerged. Most of the work on
NHRIs to this point has been by legal scholars, but social scientists such
as sociologists and political scientists are starting to examine them as well.
NHRIs are domestic institutions that have some mandate to protect and/or
enhance the human rights of the citizens of the state in which they are
established (Carver, 2010). They operate in an unusual space between the
government and civil society. Being established by the government, they
work with and are often financed by both the government and NGOs. This
causes independence to be a constant challenge for NHRIs, as they are
established and (at least partially) financed by the very government that
they are to keep in check (Mertus, 2009).
Goodman and Pegram (2011) note that since the Paris Principles were
defined in 1991, there has been a remarkable cascade of states adopting
them at a rate of over five per year. Democratizing states have done so in
part owing to pressure from the democratic states, and others in an effort
to become legitimate members of the international community (Reif, 2000).
Some work has been done on which types of states establish NHRIs (Koo &
Ramirez, 2009) and how specific NHRIs operate (e.g., Gomez, 1998; Mertus,
2009; Okafor & Agbakwa, 2002; Parlevliet, Lamb, & Maloka, 2005), but we
have yet to find out their effects on state repression as a whole; a recent
edited volume by Goodman and Pegram (2012) is an excellent place to learn
more about what we do know, and what questions scholars ought to explore.
Macroeconomic Performance. Scholars widely believe that the state of the
economy—overall output, growth, inflation, and unemployment—influences
government repression. Yet, empirical work has established but one robust
relationship: a negative cross-sectional correlation between output (e.g.,
gross domestic product) and repression. Many studies also report a correlation between other macroeconomic indicators and repression, but an equally
large number fail to find such a correlation. The major weakness with this
work is that little of it engages the dissent–repression literature and makes
a theoretical case about the expected equilibrium outcome of a change in

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various indicators of macroeconomic performance. For example, many
argue that rising inflation and unemployment will generate dissent, but are
silent about how governments are going to react to that dissent. What we
know about the impact of political institutions on repression suggests that
governments’ use of coercion is likely to vary across political institutions (as
will levels and types of dissent); yet, existing research has to theoretically
engage those processes. As such, the standard use of macroeconomic output
is as a control variable, and a robust negative correlation exists across a
remarkable array of research designs and specifications.
Population Characteristics. Like macroeconomic performance, the impact of
the characteristics of populations—especially size and heterogeneity across
class, ethnic, linguistic, racial, and religious categories—on repression have
been the focus of considerable scientific study. Also, like macroeconomic performance, only one indicator produces robust findings across studies: the size
of the population (larger countries have greater repression, on average). Our
reaction to the mixed findings on the heterogeneity of populations is much
the same as it is toward the mixed findings regarding macroeconomic performance: government repression (and dissident activity) is not homogeneous
across political institutions and the challenges the government receives. This,
then, is another excellent area for theoretical development.
INTERNATIONAL FACTORS THAT AFFECT STATE REPRESSION
Having sketched the main findings of the influence of domestic characteristics on repression, we turn our attention to outlining what we know about
the impact of behavior and structures outside the state. Behavior includes
the activities of other states, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), and
international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs). Structures include
international law and the position of states within political and economic
networks.
Diplomacy and Coercion. States use a mix of both diplomacy and coercion to
influence one another. A small literature exists that explores the impact of
other country’s behavior on a given country’s repressive activity, although
it has become dated and left little impact. Moore (1995; Moore & Davis,
1998) conducted an events data analysis to show that the conflictual and
cooperative behavior of both sponsor states and neighboring states impacted
the Rhodesian and Zairean governments’ hostility toward dissidents (controlling for the dissidents’ behavior). Goldstein and Pevehouse (1997;
Goldstein, Pevehouse, Gerner, &Telhami, 2001; Pevehouse & Goldstein,

Why Do Governments Abuse Human Rights?

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1999) conducted similar studies of the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts, as well
as the Israeli—Palestinian conflicts, and similarly found that the dynamics
of dissent and repression are influenced by the foreign policy behavior of
other governments. Unfortunately, this work has stimulated little in the way
of follow-up and has not influenced other work on government repression.
INGOs and Naming and Shaming. As noted above, it is well established that
a social movement of activists, diplomats, and lawyers3 produced, in the
latter half of the twentieth century, a human rights regime (Hunt, 2007; Keck
& Sikkink, 1998; Lauren, 1998; Tsutsui & Wotipka, 2004) that made claims
which specifically limited the state’s ability to use coercion (e.g., Donnelly,
2004, pp. 1–53). The movement first established, both normatively and then
legally, that these human rights exist: the state could not arbitrarily arrest or
detain people, denude them of property, torture them, and so on. The major
tool that the movement used to first create those norms and later advocate
for legal instruments and then compliance with the norms and laws was to
name and shame violators: publicly advance allegations of states’ abuse of
people (e.g., Clark, 2001).
Does naming and shaming work? A primary role of INGOs is to shed light
on the repressive, often secretive, behavior of governments around the world.
If leaders care about their international reputation, public censuring should
add an additional cost to consider before repressing.4 INGOs often make
repression more visible by alerting international media to focus on the state
in question (Keck & Sikkink, 1998). This mechanism assumes that other states
will condemn leaders for the way in which they treat their citizens. Another
mechanism that has been theorized is that INGOs provide information about
abuses in a given country to another country’s citizens that detest repression
and have the ability to lobby their government to intervene5 in the country where abuses are taking place (Risse & Sikkink, 1999). Yet another way
in which INGOs are believed to increase the cost of repression is by offering resources to domestic movements on the ground (Risse & Ropp, 1999).
These resources allow domestic groups to better organize, making them a
more credible threat to the government, whether the ensuing protest is violent or nonviolent (Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011; Murdie & Bhasin, 2011). This
mechanism is highly effective when there are human rights INGOs in the
neighboring states and the borders are relatively open (Bell, Murdie, & Chad
Clay, 2012). Although INGOs lean on naming and shaming as their primary
3. Who were inspired by the parchment institutions produced during the American and French Revolutions (and the Enlightenment, more generally).
4. Or, following the principal–agent logic, the additional cost should give the leader more incentive
to make sure repression does not happen on his watch.
5. Intervention can include public condemnation, economic sanctions, and/or military action.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

means of reducing human rights abuse, there is some research that suggests
other groups—NGOs, religious groups, and foreign governments6 —may be
more effective at using this tool (Franklin, 2008). Further research on who is
and how naming and shaming is performed is in order to advance our understanding of the effect of international reputation and human rights abuses.
International Law. What of international law? The research done on international law focuses on international treaties, and the monitoring and sanctioning mechanisms they create. Studies of the nine different core human rights
treaties7 have yielded disparate results. When correlation with state behavior is discovered, its direction tends to vary depending on which treaty and
which rights are being studied. Therefore, there are an increasing number of
studies that say that international human rights treaties are related to better,
worse, or no change in human rights practices. The theoretical underpinnings
of this research are still being debated. Those that find treaties correlated
with no effect on human rights practices view treaties as meaningless scraps
of paper that, if they do anything, screen which countries planned on (not)
violating human rights to begin with (Downs, Rocke, & Barsoom, 1996; Von
Stein, 2005).
Some empirical results suggest treaties have an effect (Hill, 2010; Simmons,
2009). For this reason, scholars are now starting to look into what makes
different treaties different and how that affects ratification and state repression. So far, it has been found that when treaties impose greater costs on
governments, such as the more stringent rules of many optional protocols,
they more effectively protect human rights (Cole, 2009). Examples of treaty
content that would impose these greater costs are the allowance of more,
unannounced monitoring of institutions in which human rights abuses may
occur; state-to-state complaints; or individual petitions. So far, it seems that
treaty rules are more important than treaty substance (such as which rights
are protected) in affecting state repressiveness.
Law works best when it can be enforced. Some indict international law on
the grounds that states can break the law with impunity. International human
rights law is particularly hard to enforce because mechanisms such as reciprocity do not apply. With human rights issues, if state x abuses its citizens,
6. Although INGOs can bring foreign governments into the foray.
7. The nine core UN human rights treaties are: the International Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965), International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1966), Convention on the Elimination of All
forms of Discrimination against Women (1979), Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman
or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984), Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families
(1990), Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006), and International Convention for the
Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (2006).

Why Do Governments Abuse Human Rights?

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state y cannot reciprocate in order to get compliance from state x by abusing
its own citizens.
A number of international and regional courts/tribunals have been established to address the enforcement concern.8 These include the International
Criminal Court, the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American
Court of Human Rights, and the African Court on Human and Peoples’
Rights, etc. Some scholars view courts and tribunals as opportunities to
sharpen the teeth of international law. Others argue that the potential for
an impending trial may make leaders who are committing violent actions
against their citizens more willing to violate rights, as they no longer have
the option of “retiring” to a friendly country, and thus will fight tooth and
claw to retain power. For now, the empirical record is mixed. Sikkink (2011)
finds that international courts and tribunals do, in fact, decrease the number
of human rights abuses perpetuated by states, while Meernik, Nichols, and
King (2010) find that they have no impact on human rights behavior. The
research that finds no impact is done on states after civil war, which may be
a situation in which it is harder to attain respect for human rights because
of the potential recurrence of violence.9 We have much more to learn about
the impact of international courts and tribunals on governments’ (lack of)
respect for rights.
THE CURRENT AND FUTURE STATE OF STATE REPRESSION
RESEARCH
The study of state repression forces scholars to straddle the fence between
comparative politics and international relations. The abuses happen within
the border of the state, but if domestic politics and institutions and international regimes and nongovernmental organizations influence these outcomes. Scholars have increasingly recognized the importance of taking into
account both realms––domestic and international––of politics in order to better understand why states repress their citizens, and what can be done to
minimize this.
A budding line of research explores how domestic institutions allow
international institutions to be more effective on the ground. One of the
more fleshed out of these research programs is that of domestic courts’
ability to make international treaties work for the citizens within countries
(Hathaway, 2007; Lupu, 2013; Powell & Staton, 2009). Descriptive and formal
theory suggests that states that ratify international treaties, such as the UN
8. The international tribunals that have been established are the International Criminal Tribunals for
the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the Extraordinary Chambers in
the Courts of Cambodia, and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon.
9. After all, some researchers have found that countries involved in civil war abuse human rights
more often (Poe & Tate, 1994; Poe, Tate, & Camp Keith, 1999).

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treaties discussed above, are more constrained in their repressive behavior,
because the domestic legal system makes sure that if the treaty is violated,
there are potential domestic legal sanctions waiting for those that violated
or issued the violation. Different authors stress different characteristics of
the judiciary. But, whether it is judicial independence, effectiveness, power,
or some combination of these aspects, the empirical record supports the
theoretical propositions.
Given the discussion about the judiciary’s effect on ratification of treaties,
might other interactions between domestic and international institutions be
important? If a state ratifies a human rights treaty, NHRIs may be able to constrain the behavior of the state too. NHRIs are a heterogeneous bunch, but
they all perform some combination of the following: monitoring, education,
receiving individual complaints, legal recommendation, and publishing allegations and judicial results. One can see how the unique position that NHRIs
hold between government and civil society make them a potential domestic
institution to delegate some of the human rights responsibilities agreed to in
international treaties.
Perhaps, other important interactions exist. For instance, might INGOs
be more effective working with NHRIs? Perhaps, INGOs working on the
ground can help a state hold true to its international agreements. Effective
domestic judiciaries may have interesting effects on international courts
and tribunals––perhaps making them less necessary, making their rulings
more effective, or some combination of these. Just as scholars looked at the
independent effects of institutions, and just recently started considering
their interactions, it may be time for scholars to look at more complex
interactions with three or more institutions. The groundwork was set with
classic studies on what effects state repression. It is now incumbent on us as
researchers to dig deeper, asking more complex questions.
CONSIDERATIONS FOR MOVING FORWARD
Now that we have surveyed the classic literature and the current state of
affairs, it is important to recognize what can be done to keep the state repression research relevant and fruitful. In this section, we consider where repression research may want to peer and the data and methodological challenges
that may be waiting for brave researchers.
CONCEPTUALIZING REPRESSION: DISAGGREGATION AND SUBSTITUTION
Pioneering research on repression focused mostly on political and civil rights.
From there, scholars started to explore physical integrity rights such as torture, genocide, political imprisonment, and disappearing. The Cingranelli

Why Do Governments Abuse Human Rights?

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and Richards data set (CIRI) disaggregates both groups of rights, that is, there
are measures for speech freedom, religious freedom, etc. for political–civil
rights, and the four examples above (substituting extrajudicial killing for
genocide) that make up physical integrity rights. Often, researchers aggregate them into their respective indices. Some are starting to look at different
types of rights violations as their outcomes of interest, and more should continue to do so. After all, the causal mechanism for why a state would violate
an individual’s right to practice religion freely may very well differ from the
mechanism for why a state would violate its workers’ rights. Researchers
that disaggregate the repression activities often focus on one type of violation, that is, torture. However, researchers would be wise to consider that
governments have a whole palette of repression at their disposal. They may
use one to substitute for another, depending on the institutional, political, or
cultural environment. This point brings up two considerations. First, some
studies that have looked at one type of repression may find a decrease in that
outcome, but the story may not be as positive as it seems, as a government
may substitute another form of repression. This may occur when one type of
repression, such as torture, is high on the monitoring radar, but others are not.
The second point stems from the first. There are other types of repression that
are not captured in the most commonly used indices, for instance, surveillance, spying, and harassment. It is important to theorize about which types
of repression will be used when, and what strategies governments may use to
continue repressing. From there, it may be important to collect data on repressive activities that have yet to be considered, such as spying. Although spying
is an innately secret activity, making data collection difficult, it is incumbent
on us as honest, thorough researchers to be creative and diligent when considering these tough questions and situations.
DIGGING DEEPER: EXAMINING REPRESSION THROUGH A MORE POWERFUL LENS
As the scholarship on state repression continues, some researchers may wish
to examine some of the general theories with more fine-toothed combs in
order to discover important details. For instance, if the outcome of interest is
one type of repression, the substitution issues discussed directly above also
apply. Torture is the clearest example of this concern. Since the monitoring
of states’ torture practices began, governments have devised ways to torture
that are harder to observe (Rejali, 2007). Sometimes referred to as clean torture,
these practices do not leave visible marks on the body of the victim, making
accusation a he said/she said affair. By recognizing this and coming up with
new, creative data and methods, scholars may be able to probe deeper into
government repression strategies.

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New data and methods may also be necessary for discovering more specific patterns of government behavior. For instance, most studies to date use
the country–year as the unit of analysis. This decision carries with it important assumptions, both spatially and temporally. With regards to the spatial
assumption, researchers that are interested in the interaction between dissent
and repression that use the country–year as the unit of analysis assume that
the dissent that happens in one place in the country effects the repression
in another. For instance, there is a good chance that dissent in Boston, MA
is not related to the repression of rights that happen in the same year in Los
Angeles, CA. Also, with respect to time, if one is concerned with how governments and citizens react to one another’s actions, it is hard to tease out any
specifics when everything that happens in a year is not picked apart more
scrupulously. Perhaps, it is time for researchers to focus on specific regions,
countries, districts, cities, etc. in order to get more time data at the level of
quarter, month, week, etc.
CONCLUSION
Why do states repress the rights of their own citizens? This essay has
addressed that question by reviewing the foundational research. From there,
we shone spotlights on the most current research that is doing the most to
push the field. Finally, we offered suggestions as to where research may or
should be heading in order to better understand why governments repress.
Given space constraints, we cannot address all the merits comment. For
instance, we did not address the right to protect (R2P) and truth commissions, much less second and third generation human rights. In addition,
the essay does not offer a one-size-fits-all answer to the original question of
why governments repress. Instead, as with much (social) science inquiry, it
highlights that as we as scholars dig deeper, there are evermore complexities
and myriad new questions to consider. These unforeseen issues allow us to
better understand government behavior that is as old as the government
itself. As we develop more insight into why states choose to abuse human
rights, we add not only to theoretical knowledge for its own sake, but offer
information that may be used by policy-makers in order to minimize the
(potential) harm that may be done to individuals by the governments that
are charged to protect them.
REFERENCES
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of human rights INGOs. Journal of Politics, 74(2), 1–16.
Bueno de Mesquita, B., Smith, A., Siverson, R., & Morrow, J. D. (2003). The logic of
political survival. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

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13

Carver, R. (2010). A new answer to an old question: National human rights institutions and the domestication of international law. Human Rights Law Review, 10(1),
1–32.
Chenoweth, E., & Stephan, M. J. (2011). Why civil resistance works: The strategic logic of
nonviolent conflict. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Cingranelli, D., & Filippov, M. (2010). Electoral rules and incentives to protect human
rights. The Journal of Politics, 72(1), 243–257.
Clark, A. M. (2001). Diplomacy of conscience: Amnesty international and changing human
rights norms. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Cole, W. M. (2009). Hard and soft commitments to human rights treaties, 1966–2000.
Sociological Forum, 24(3), 563–588.
Davenport, C. (2007a). State repression and political order. Annual Review of Political
Science, 10, 1–23.
Davenport, C. (2007b). State repression and the domestic democratic peace. New York,
NY: Cambridge University Press.
Davenport, C., & Inman, M. (2012). The state of state repression research since the
1990s. Terrorism and Political Violence, 24(4), 619–634.
Donnelly, J. (2004). State sovereignty and human rights. Working Paper. Retrieved
from
http://www.du.edu/korbel/hrhw/workingpapers/2004/21-donnelly2004.pdf
Downs, D. M., Rocke, G. W., & Barsoom, P. N. (1996). Is the good news about compliance good news about cooperation? International Organization, 50(3), 379–406.
Franklin, J. C. (2008). Shame on you: The impact of human rights criticism on political
repression in latin America. International Studies Quarterly, 52(1), 187–211.
Gregory, P. R. (2009). Terror by quota: State security from Lenin to Stalin. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press.
Goldstein, J. S., & Pevehouse, J. C. (1997). Reciprocity, bullying and international
cooperation: Time-series analysis of the Bosnia conflict. The American Political Science Review, 91(3), 515–529.
Goldstein, J. S., Pevehouse, J. C., Gerner, D. J., & Telhami, S. (2001). Reciprocity, triagularity, and cooperation in the middle east, 1979–1997. Journal of Conflict Resolution,
45(5), 594–620.
Goodman, R., & Pegram, T. (2012). The persistent power of human rights: From commitment to compliance. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Gomez, M. (1998). Sri Lanka’s new human rights commission. Human Rights Quarterly, 20(2), 281–302.
Hathaway, O. A. (2007). Why do countries commit to human rights treaties? Journal
of Conflict Resolution, 51(4), 588–621.
Hill, D. W., Jr., (2010). Estimating the effects of human rights treaties on state behavior. Journal of Politics, 72(4), 1161–1174.
Hobbes, T. [1651] (1991). In R. Tuck (Ed.), Leviathan. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Hunt, L. (2007). Inventing human rights. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company,
Inc.
Keck, M. E., & Sikkink, K. (1998). Activists beyond borders: Advocacy networks in international politics. New York, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Keith, L. C., Tate, C. N., & Poe, S. C. (2009). Is the law a mere parchment barrier to
human rights abuse? Journal of Politics, 71(2), 644–660.
Koo, J.-W., & Ramirez, F. O. (2009). National incorporation of global human rights:
Worldwide expansion of national human rights institutions, 1966–2004. Social
Forces, 87(3), 1321–1353.
Lauren, P. G. (1998). The evolution of international human rights. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Little, D. (n.d). Ground to stand on: A philosophical reappraisal of human rights
language. Unpublished Manuscript.
Locke, J. [1689] (1960). In P. Laslett (Ed.), Two treatises of government. New York, NY:
Cambridge University Press.
Lupu, Y. (2013). Best evidence: The role of information in domestic judicial enforcement of international human rights agreements. International Organization, 67(3),
469–503.
Meernik, J. D., Nichols, A., & King, K. L. (2010). The impact of international tribunals
and domestic trials on peace and human rights after civil war. International Studies
Perspectives, 11(4), 309–334.
Mertus, J. A. (2009). Human rights matters: Local politics and national human rights institutions. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Moore, W. H. (1995). Action-reaction or rational expectations? Reciprocity and the
domestic-international conflict nexus during the ‘Rhodesia Problem’. Journal of
Conflict Resolution, 39(1), 129–167.
Moore, W. H., & Davis, D. R. (1998). Ties that bind? Domestic and international conflict behavior in Zaire. Comparative Political Studies, 31(1), 45–71.
Murdie, A., & Bhasin, T. (2011). Aiding and abetting? Human rights INGOs and
domestic anti-government protest. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 55(2), 163–191.
Okafor, O. C., & Agbakwa, S. C. (2002). On legalism, popular agency and ‘Voices
of Suffering’: The Nigerian national human rights commission in context. Human
Rights Quarterly, 24(3), 662–720.
Parlevliet, M., Lamb, G., & Maloka, V. (2005). Defenders of human rights, managers of
conflict, builders of peace? National human rights institutions in Africa. Cape Town,
South Africa: Centre for Conflict Resolution, University of Cape Town.
Pevehouse, J. C., & Goldstein, J. S. (1999). Serbian compliance or defiance in Kosovo?
Statistical analysis and real-time predictions. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 43(4),
538–546.
Poe, S. C., & Tate, C. N. (1994). Repression of human rights to personal integrity in
the 1980s: A global analysis. American Political Science Review, 88(4), 853–872.
Poe, S. C., Tate, C. N., & Camp Keith, L. (1999). Repression of human rights to personal integrity in the 1980s: A global cross-sectional study covering the years
1976–1993. International Studies Quarterly, 43(2), 291–313.
Powell, E. J., & Staton, J. K. (2009). Domestic judicial institutions and human rights
treaty violation. International Studies Quarterly, 53(1), 149–174.
Reif, L. C. (2000). Building democratic institutions: The role of national human rights
institutions in good governance and human rights protection. Harvard Human
Rights Journal, 13, 1–69.

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15

Rejali, D. (2007). Torture and democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Risse, T., & Ropp, S. C. (1999). International human rights norms and domestic
change: Conclusions. In T. Risse, S. C. Ropp & K. Sikkink (Eds.), The power or human
rights: International norms and domestic change. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Risse, T., & Sikkink, K. (1999). The socialization of international human rights norms
into domestic practices: Introduction. In T. Risse, S. C. Ropp & K. Sikkink (Eds.),
The power or human rights: International norms and domestic change. New York, NY:
Cambridge University Press.
Rousseau, J. J. [1762] (1997). In V. Gourevitch (Ed.), The social contract. New York, NY:
Cambridge University Press.
Rummel, R. J. (1994). Death by government. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Sikkink, K. (2011). The justice cascade: How human rights prosecutions are changing world
politics. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Simmons, B. (2009). Mobilizing for human rights: International law in domestic politics.
New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Tsutsui, K., & Wotipka, C. M. (2004). Global civil society and the international human
rights movement: Citizen participation in human rights international nongovernmental organizations. Social Forces, 83(2), 587–620.
Von Stein, J. (2005). Do treaties constrain or screen? Seclection bias and treaty compliance. American Political Science Review, 99, 611–622.

FURTHER READING
Davenport, C. (2007). State repression and political order. Annual Review of Political
Science, 10, 1–23.
Goodman, R., & Pegram, T. (2011). Human rights, state compliance, and change: Assessing national human rights institutions. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Hafner-Burton, E. M. (2012). International regimes for human rights. Annual Review
of Political Science, 15, 265–286.
Hafner-Burton, E. M., Victor, D. G., & Lupu, Y. (2012). Political science research on
international law: The state of the field. The American Journal of International Law,
106(1), 47–97.
Moore, W. H. (2010). Incarceration, interrogation and counterterror: Do (Liberal)
democratic institutions constrain leviathan? PS: Political Science & Politics, 43(3),
421–424.
Simmons, B. (2009). Mobilizing for human rights: International law in domestic politics.
New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

WILL H. MOORE SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Will H. Moore is Professor of Political Science at Florida State University.
He holds a BA (Economics, 1984) and a PhD (Political Science, 1991) from

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he studied for the latter under
the direction of Ted Robert Gurr and James R. Scarritt. His research can be
found in the American Journal of Political Science, International Organization,
International Studies Quarterly, and Journal of Conflict Resolution, among other
outlets.
RYAN M. WELCH SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Ryan M. Welch is a Political Science PhD student at Florida State University,
and holds a BS (Entomology), BA (Political Science), and MS (Entomology)
from the University of Florida (2006). His research interests include human
rights, institutions, and international law.
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Why Do Governments
Abuse Human Rights?
WILL H. MOORE and RYAN M. WELCH

Abstract
Because the abuse of human beings is abhorrent, we normatively expect governments to respect those rights. However, throughout human history, abuse of human
begins has been the norm. Governments abuse rights because doing so helps leaders exercise, expand, or retain their power. Normatively, this is troubling. Yet, as
a positive matter, it should not be surprising. We begin the essay explaining why
this is so, and then turn to the question that broadly captures the research agendas
of those studying the topic of human rights: how can people constrain Leviathan?
Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, several foundational studies helped establish
a generally agreed on account that governments respond to dissent with coercion.
Domestically, democracy and economic output both reduce rights abuses, while large
populations increase repression. The impact of international characteristics is less
well developed. In fact, what is known is that the international human right regime
is complex and that norms, treaties, and international courts do not have a consistent effect on a countrys’ respect for rights. Researchers are now studying complex
relationships between domestic and international factors. For instance, the domestic
judiciary of a country influences the extent to which human rights treaties constrain
government abuse of rights. Over the coming decade, we expect scholars to produce
considerable new knowledge about the impact of norms, treaties, and international
courts on the states’ (lack of) respect for human rights.

INTRODUCTION
Given that governments own a monopoly on the legitimate use of force
within their borders, it should not surprise us that since its inception,
the states have not only repressed some of those who live within their
sovereignty claim, but have routinely done so. Yet, the dominant narrative,
especially in societies governed by democracy, is that governments do not
abuse people. It is critical to point out that this is a normative expectation,
not a positive statement about the state of the world. As human beings,
we appear to be innately inclined to tune out abuse and murder of human
beings by the government, despite the fact that, as Rummel (1994) has
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

documented, the government is the top-ranked human institution for killing
human beings. Further, as the international human rights movement has
grown, in fits and starts, from its birth during the enlightenment to become
normatively dominant since the 1970s (e.g., Hunt, 2007; Keck & Sikkink,
1998; Lauren, 1998; Tsutsui &Wotipka, 2004), governments have shifted
from being open about their abuse to actively denying and hiding it.1 The
result is that there is a remarkable disconnect between facts (governments
routinely abuse and even kill) and norms (governments must respect human
rights). We begin with a brief explanation of what human rights are, and
then explain why we should not be surprised that governments routinely
abuse them.
Acknowledging human rights means to limit the extent of the government’s ability to use coercion; examples of violations include torture,
arbitrary imprisonment and killing, genocide, spying, and harassment.2
Historically, human society became ruled by governments that spanned
considerable territory and large populations when individuals asserted a
sovereign right to govern and had both the coercive and administrative
capacity to (more or less) effectively enforce that claim. The enlightenment
period’s writings about a social contract between people and the ruler (e.g.,
Hobbes [1651] 1991; Locke [1689] 1960; Rousseau [1762] 1997) was a reaction
to that status quo, and it cannot be underemphasized how revolutionary
were those ideas. Yet, we rarely appreciated that the social contract, as presented by Hobbes, for example, implicitly views the ruler as a sort of referee
who is granted a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercion to adjudicate
disputes among people, without concern to adjudication of disputes between
people and the state. The creation of an institution that both exercises power
and has the sole authority to denude people of property, arrest, incarcerate,
try and judge, and even execute them is remarkable; yet, that is at the core
of the social contract. If such an institution is powerful enough to enforce its
claims to the above, and the human beings who exercise authority on behalf
of the state are conventional human beings susceptible to the shortcomings
to which we know human beings are susceptible, then it would be curious
indeed if abuse of human beings by government was rare. By this account,
the question shifts from the normatively driven query to a positive one: how
can human beings constrain Leviathan (Moore, 2010)? The international
human rights regime has been constructed to precisely perform that.
Though the United Nations General Assembly declared the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948, decades passed before social
1. This is most apparent in the domain of torture (Rejali, 2007).
2. This essay focuses on what are called “physical integrity of the person” rights, or “first generation”
rights. Economic, social, and cultural rights also exist, and are sometimes referred to as second and third
generation rights. Wikipedia entries, and other similar resources, provide serviceable overviews.

Why Do Governments Abuse Human Rights?

3

scientists began to study human rights violations and the effort to limit them.
Since the 1980s, however, there has been fruitful research that has led to a
number of accepted reasons for why some governments violate rights less
than others. This essay is designed to navigate the reader through the status
of current theory and findings, research that is presently being conducted,
and the direction in which the field is, and can be, headed. The rest of the
essay proceeds as follows. The following section reviews the foundational
work and its findings. From there, we explore the current state of human
rights research and how scholars have addressed some of the challenges state
repression researchers face. Lastly, we identify unresolved challenges and
suggest some directions in which future research may go.
WHAT WE KNOW
The research that has explored human rights violations in the last few
decades has yielded some results that have come to be regarded as generally
accepted. These have largely existed in two separate realms: domestic and
international factors. Some of the most cutting-edge research considers
both of these domains and their interactions, and we review it below. In
this section, we identify the few consensuses that exist in the literature. We
then discuss the domestic factors known to influence how states conduct
themselves with respect to their citizens. Following that, we review some of
the international factors that are foundational.
DOMESTIC FACTORS THAT AFFECT STATE REPRESSION
In two recent reviews, Christian Davenport usefully summarizes what we
know about the domestic sources that influence governments’ propensity to
repress (Davenport, 2007a; Davenport & Inman, 2012). The first is the behavior of those who using means that the government does not view as legitimate
to challenge policy and/or the government’s authority: dissident activity.
The second is the structures in which both the dissidents and the government
act: political institutions, macroeconomic performance, and the characteristics of the population.
Behavior: Domestic Challenges to Power. On average, states respond with coercion to challenges that they deem illegitimate: they arrest, ban, disappear,
harass, imprison, kill, and torture. Whether the dissent is illegitimate varies
across countries and with the (potential) consequences of the dissent. For
instance, some countries are more amenable to peaceful protest than others,
although even a tolerant country will resort to more coercion if that peaceful

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

movement begins to challenge the government authority in a major way. All
states view violent dissent as illegitimate, and with few exceptions it is met
with coercion. In addition, some states engage in active repression to deter
dissent: it becomes a defining feature of governance as under Stalin (e.g.,
Gregory, 2009). Thus, while the behavior of dissidents generates coercion in
all states, researchers turn to political institutions, macroeconomic performance, and population characteristics to explain both why dissident–state
interactions vary across countries and why some states actively repress in
the absence of dissent.
Political Institutions. Political institutions—how people acquire power and
how power is distributed across the government—shape the behavior of
leaders and the dissidents who would challenge them. The institution
that has drawn greatest interest is democracy, which can be defined thinly
(rule by the people) or thickly (separation of powers and civil liberties).
Davenport (2007b) reports the existence of a domestic democratic peace,
showing that elections (voice) and separation of powers (veto) each reduce
the extent to which governments turn to repression as a tool. Others have
extended the argument to civil liberties such as freedom of assembly and
speech (Little, n.d). Lastly, some work focuses on parchment institutions,
such as the provisions included in the constitution (Keith, Tate, & Poe, 2009).
Put in broad terms, democracy is best understood as a set of institutions that
alter the incentives of government officials, and Cingranelli and Filippov
(2010) provide an excellent study that shows how various characteristics of
electoral systems influence the incentives of elected officials to respect rights.
The work on the domestic democratic peace can be viewed more broadly
within the context of what is known as Selectorate Theory (Bueno de Mesquita,
Smith, Siverson, & Morrow, 2003), which argues that the defining feature of
political institutions is the proportion of the population that the leader must
keep satisfied to ensure continued tenure in office. As that number shrinks,
the state will be less constrained by a formal separation of powers, other portions of the constitution, and less concerned about succeeding in free and
fair elections. As a consequence, they will become more willing to abuse and
repress members of the population who are not members of the group they
must satisfy to remain in office.
This work begins to provide an answer to our query about tethering
Leviathan. Note that the executive branch of government is responsible for
state security, and that the military and police report to the executive. As
such, the executive is the branch of government that represses. To constrain
Leviathan, then, we must begin by making the executive accountable to as
broad a portion of society as possible via free and fair elections, separating

Why Do Governments Abuse Human Rights?

5

powers, and extending civil liberties. Note that each of these reinforces the
others: power needs to be separated to make it difficult for any actor to
rule by appealing to a small number of people; civil liberties are needed
to permit political mobilization, so that elections might be free and fair;
elections are needed to give the executive an incentive not to accumulate
power by closing other branches; and so on. Part of the answer, then, is that
political institutions can help people constrain Leviathan. As it turns out,
however, there is more we can say.
Scholarly interest in another domestic institution, the national human
rights institution (NHRI), has recently emerged. Most of the work on
NHRIs to this point has been by legal scholars, but social scientists such
as sociologists and political scientists are starting to examine them as well.
NHRIs are domestic institutions that have some mandate to protect and/or
enhance the human rights of the citizens of the state in which they are
established (Carver, 2010). They operate in an unusual space between the
government and civil society. Being established by the government, they
work with and are often financed by both the government and NGOs. This
causes independence to be a constant challenge for NHRIs, as they are
established and (at least partially) financed by the very government that
they are to keep in check (Mertus, 2009).
Goodman and Pegram (2011) note that since the Paris Principles were
defined in 1991, there has been a remarkable cascade of states adopting
them at a rate of over five per year. Democratizing states have done so in
part owing to pressure from the democratic states, and others in an effort
to become legitimate members of the international community (Reif, 2000).
Some work has been done on which types of states establish NHRIs (Koo &
Ramirez, 2009) and how specific NHRIs operate (e.g., Gomez, 1998; Mertus,
2009; Okafor & Agbakwa, 2002; Parlevliet, Lamb, & Maloka, 2005), but we
have yet to find out their effects on state repression as a whole; a recent
edited volume by Goodman and Pegram (2012) is an excellent place to learn
more about what we do know, and what questions scholars ought to explore.
Macroeconomic Performance. Scholars widely believe that the state of the
economy—overall output, growth, inflation, and unemployment—influences
government repression. Yet, empirical work has established but one robust
relationship: a negative cross-sectional correlation between output (e.g.,
gross domestic product) and repression. Many studies also report a correlation between other macroeconomic indicators and repression, but an equally
large number fail to find such a correlation. The major weakness with this
work is that little of it engages the dissent–repression literature and makes
a theoretical case about the expected equilibrium outcome of a change in

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

various indicators of macroeconomic performance. For example, many
argue that rising inflation and unemployment will generate dissent, but are
silent about how governments are going to react to that dissent. What we
know about the impact of political institutions on repression suggests that
governments’ use of coercion is likely to vary across political institutions (as
will levels and types of dissent); yet, existing research has to theoretically
engage those processes. As such, the standard use of macroeconomic output
is as a control variable, and a robust negative correlation exists across a
remarkable array of research designs and specifications.
Population Characteristics. Like macroeconomic performance, the impact of
the characteristics of populations—especially size and heterogeneity across
class, ethnic, linguistic, racial, and religious categories—on repression have
been the focus of considerable scientific study. Also, like macroeconomic performance, only one indicator produces robust findings across studies: the size
of the population (larger countries have greater repression, on average). Our
reaction to the mixed findings on the heterogeneity of populations is much
the same as it is toward the mixed findings regarding macroeconomic performance: government repression (and dissident activity) is not homogeneous
across political institutions and the challenges the government receives. This,
then, is another excellent area for theoretical development.
INTERNATIONAL FACTORS THAT AFFECT STATE REPRESSION
Having sketched the main findings of the influence of domestic characteristics on repression, we turn our attention to outlining what we know about
the impact of behavior and structures outside the state. Behavior includes
the activities of other states, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), and
international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs). Structures include
international law and the position of states within political and economic
networks.
Diplomacy and Coercion. States use a mix of both diplomacy and coercion to
influence one another. A small literature exists that explores the impact of
other country’s behavior on a given country’s repressive activity, although
it has become dated and left little impact. Moore (1995; Moore & Davis,
1998) conducted an events data analysis to show that the conflictual and
cooperative behavior of both sponsor states and neighboring states impacted
the Rhodesian and Zairean governments’ hostility toward dissidents (controlling for the dissidents’ behavior). Goldstein and Pevehouse (1997;
Goldstein, Pevehouse, Gerner, &Telhami, 2001; Pevehouse & Goldstein,

Why Do Governments Abuse Human Rights?

7

1999) conducted similar studies of the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts, as well
as the Israeli—Palestinian conflicts, and similarly found that the dynamics
of dissent and repression are influenced by the foreign policy behavior of
other governments. Unfortunately, this work has stimulated little in the way
of follow-up and has not influenced other work on government repression.
INGOs and Naming and Shaming. As noted above, it is well established that
a social movement of activists, diplomats, and lawyers3 produced, in the
latter half of the twentieth century, a human rights regime (Hunt, 2007; Keck
& Sikkink, 1998; Lauren, 1998; Tsutsui & Wotipka, 2004) that made claims
which specifically limited the state’s ability to use coercion (e.g., Donnelly,
2004, pp. 1–53). The movement first established, both normatively and then
legally, that these human rights exist: the state could not arbitrarily arrest or
detain people, denude them of property, torture them, and so on. The major
tool that the movement used to first create those norms and later advocate
for legal instruments and then compliance with the norms and laws was to
name and shame violators: publicly advance allegations of states’ abuse of
people (e.g., Clark, 2001).
Does naming and shaming work? A primary role of INGOs is to shed light
on the repressive, often secretive, behavior of governments around the world.
If leaders care about their international reputation, public censuring should
add an additional cost to consider before repressing.4 INGOs often make
repression more visible by alerting international media to focus on the state
in question (Keck & Sikkink, 1998). This mechanism assumes that other states
will condemn leaders for the way in which they treat their citizens. Another
mechanism that has been theorized is that INGOs provide information about
abuses in a given country to another country’s citizens that detest repression
and have the ability to lobby their government to intervene5 in the country where abuses are taking place (Risse & Sikkink, 1999). Yet another way
in which INGOs are believed to increase the cost of repression is by offering resources to domestic movements on the ground (Risse & Ropp, 1999).
These resources allow domestic groups to better organize, making them a
more credible threat to the government, whether the ensuing protest is violent or nonviolent (Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011; Murdie & Bhasin, 2011). This
mechanism is highly effective when there are human rights INGOs in the
neighboring states and the borders are relatively open (Bell, Murdie, & Chad
Clay, 2012). Although INGOs lean on naming and shaming as their primary
3. Who were inspired by the parchment institutions produced during the American and French Revolutions (and the Enlightenment, more generally).
4. Or, following the principal–agent logic, the additional cost should give the leader more incentive
to make sure repression does not happen on his watch.
5. Intervention can include public condemnation, economic sanctions, and/or military action.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

means of reducing human rights abuse, there is some research that suggests
other groups—NGOs, religious groups, and foreign governments6 —may be
more effective at using this tool (Franklin, 2008). Further research on who is
and how naming and shaming is performed is in order to advance our understanding of the effect of international reputation and human rights abuses.
International Law. What of international law? The research done on international law focuses on international treaties, and the monitoring and sanctioning mechanisms they create. Studies of the nine different core human rights
treaties7 have yielded disparate results. When correlation with state behavior is discovered, its direction tends to vary depending on which treaty and
which rights are being studied. Therefore, there are an increasing number of
studies that say that international human rights treaties are related to better,
worse, or no change in human rights practices. The theoretical underpinnings
of this research are still being debated. Those that find treaties correlated
with no effect on human rights practices view treaties as meaningless scraps
of paper that, if they do anything, screen which countries planned on (not)
violating human rights to begin with (Downs, Rocke, & Barsoom, 1996; Von
Stein, 2005).
Some empirical results suggest treaties have an effect (Hill, 2010; Simmons,
2009). For this reason, scholars are now starting to look into what makes
different treaties different and how that affects ratification and state repression. So far, it has been found that when treaties impose greater costs on
governments, such as the more stringent rules of many optional protocols,
they more effectively protect human rights (Cole, 2009). Examples of treaty
content that would impose these greater costs are the allowance of more,
unannounced monitoring of institutions in which human rights abuses may
occur; state-to-state complaints; or individual petitions. So far, it seems that
treaty rules are more important than treaty substance (such as which rights
are protected) in affecting state repressiveness.
Law works best when it can be enforced. Some indict international law on
the grounds that states can break the law with impunity. International human
rights law is particularly hard to enforce because mechanisms such as reciprocity do not apply. With human rights issues, if state x abuses its citizens,
6. Although INGOs can bring foreign governments into the foray.
7. The nine core UN human rights treaties are: the International Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965), International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1966), Convention on the Elimination of All
forms of Discrimination against Women (1979), Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman
or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984), Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families
(1990), Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006), and International Convention for the
Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (2006).

Why Do Governments Abuse Human Rights?

9

state y cannot reciprocate in order to get compliance from state x by abusing
its own citizens.
A number of international and regional courts/tribunals have been established to address the enforcement concern.8 These include the International
Criminal Court, the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American
Court of Human Rights, and the African Court on Human and Peoples’
Rights, etc. Some scholars view courts and tribunals as opportunities to
sharpen the teeth of international law. Others argue that the potential for
an impending trial may make leaders who are committing violent actions
against their citizens more willing to violate rights, as they no longer have
the option of “retiring” to a friendly country, and thus will fight tooth and
claw to retain power. For now, the empirical record is mixed. Sikkink (2011)
finds that international courts and tribunals do, in fact, decrease the number
of human rights abuses perpetuated by states, while Meernik, Nichols, and
King (2010) find that they have no impact on human rights behavior. The
research that finds no impact is done on states after civil war, which may be
a situation in which it is harder to attain respect for human rights because
of the potential recurrence of violence.9 We have much more to learn about
the impact of international courts and tribunals on governments’ (lack of)
respect for rights.
THE CURRENT AND FUTURE STATE OF STATE REPRESSION
RESEARCH
The study of state repression forces scholars to straddle the fence between
comparative politics and international relations. The abuses happen within
the border of the state, but if domestic politics and institutions and international regimes and nongovernmental organizations influence these outcomes. Scholars have increasingly recognized the importance of taking into
account both realms––domestic and international––of politics in order to better understand why states repress their citizens, and what can be done to
minimize this.
A budding line of research explores how domestic institutions allow
international institutions to be more effective on the ground. One of the
more fleshed out of these research programs is that of domestic courts’
ability to make international treaties work for the citizens within countries
(Hathaway, 2007; Lupu, 2013; Powell & Staton, 2009). Descriptive and formal
theory suggests that states that ratify international treaties, such as the UN
8. The international tribunals that have been established are the International Criminal Tribunals for
the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the Extraordinary Chambers in
the Courts of Cambodia, and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon.
9. After all, some researchers have found that countries involved in civil war abuse human rights
more often (Poe & Tate, 1994; Poe, Tate, & Camp Keith, 1999).

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

treaties discussed above, are more constrained in their repressive behavior,
because the domestic legal system makes sure that if the treaty is violated,
there are potential domestic legal sanctions waiting for those that violated
or issued the violation. Different authors stress different characteristics of
the judiciary. But, whether it is judicial independence, effectiveness, power,
or some combination of these aspects, the empirical record supports the
theoretical propositions.
Given the discussion about the judiciary’s effect on ratification of treaties,
might other interactions between domestic and international institutions be
important? If a state ratifies a human rights treaty, NHRIs may be able to constrain the behavior of the state too. NHRIs are a heterogeneous bunch, but
they all perform some combination of the following: monitoring, education,
receiving individual complaints, legal recommendation, and publishing allegations and judicial results. One can see how the unique position that NHRIs
hold between government and civil society make them a potential domestic
institution to delegate some of the human rights responsibilities agreed to in
international treaties.
Perhaps, other important interactions exist. For instance, might INGOs
be more effective working with NHRIs? Perhaps, INGOs working on the
ground can help a state hold true to its international agreements. Effective
domestic judiciaries may have interesting effects on international courts
and tribunals––perhaps making them less necessary, making their rulings
more effective, or some combination of these. Just as scholars looked at the
independent effects of institutions, and just recently started considering
their interactions, it may be time for scholars to look at more complex
interactions with three or more institutions. The groundwork was set with
classic studies on what effects state repression. It is now incumbent on us as
researchers to dig deeper, asking more complex questions.
CONSIDERATIONS FOR MOVING FORWARD
Now that we have surveyed the classic literature and the current state of
affairs, it is important to recognize what can be done to keep the state repression research relevant and fruitful. In this section, we consider where repression research may want to peer and the data and methodological challenges
that may be waiting for brave researchers.
CONCEPTUALIZING REPRESSION: DISAGGREGATION AND SUBSTITUTION
Pioneering research on repression focused mostly on political and civil rights.
From there, scholars started to explore physical integrity rights such as torture, genocide, political imprisonment, and disappearing. The Cingranelli

Why Do Governments Abuse Human Rights?

11

and Richards data set (CIRI) disaggregates both groups of rights, that is, there
are measures for speech freedom, religious freedom, etc. for political–civil
rights, and the four examples above (substituting extrajudicial killing for
genocide) that make up physical integrity rights. Often, researchers aggregate them into their respective indices. Some are starting to look at different
types of rights violations as their outcomes of interest, and more should continue to do so. After all, the causal mechanism for why a state would violate
an individual’s right to practice religion freely may very well differ from the
mechanism for why a state would violate its workers’ rights. Researchers
that disaggregate the repression activities often focus on one type of violation, that is, torture. However, researchers would be wise to consider that
governments have a whole palette of repression at their disposal. They may
use one to substitute for another, depending on the institutional, political, or
cultural environment. This point brings up two considerations. First, some
studies that have looked at one type of repression may find a decrease in that
outcome, but the story may not be as positive as it seems, as a government
may substitute another form of repression. This may occur when one type of
repression, such as torture, is high on the monitoring radar, but others are not.
The second point stems from the first. There are other types of repression that
are not captured in the most commonly used indices, for instance, surveillance, spying, and harassment. It is important to theorize about which types
of repression will be used when, and what strategies governments may use to
continue repressing. From there, it may be important to collect data on repressive activities that have yet to be considered, such as spying. Although spying
is an innately secret activity, making data collection difficult, it is incumbent
on us as honest, thorough researchers to be creative and diligent when considering these tough questions and situations.
DIGGING DEEPER: EXAMINING REPRESSION THROUGH A MORE POWERFUL LENS
As the scholarship on state repression continues, some researchers may wish
to examine some of the general theories with more fine-toothed combs in
order to discover important details. For instance, if the outcome of interest is
one type of repression, the substitution issues discussed directly above also
apply. Torture is the clearest example of this concern. Since the monitoring
of states’ torture practices began, governments have devised ways to torture
that are harder to observe (Rejali, 2007). Sometimes referred to as clean torture,
these practices do not leave visible marks on the body of the victim, making
accusation a he said/she said affair. By recognizing this and coming up with
new, creative data and methods, scholars may be able to probe deeper into
government repression strategies.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

New data and methods may also be necessary for discovering more specific patterns of government behavior. For instance, most studies to date use
the country–year as the unit of analysis. This decision carries with it important assumptions, both spatially and temporally. With regards to the spatial
assumption, researchers that are interested in the interaction between dissent
and repression that use the country–year as the unit of analysis assume that
the dissent that happens in one place in the country effects the repression
in another. For instance, there is a good chance that dissent in Boston, MA
is not related to the repression of rights that happen in the same year in Los
Angeles, CA. Also, with respect to time, if one is concerned with how governments and citizens react to one another’s actions, it is hard to tease out any
specifics when everything that happens in a year is not picked apart more
scrupulously. Perhaps, it is time for researchers to focus on specific regions,
countries, districts, cities, etc. in order to get more time data at the level of
quarter, month, week, etc.
CONCLUSION
Why do states repress the rights of their own citizens? This essay has
addressed that question by reviewing the foundational research. From there,
we shone spotlights on the most current research that is doing the most to
push the field. Finally, we offered suggestions as to where research may or
should be heading in order to better understand why governments repress.
Given space constraints, we cannot address all the merits comment. For
instance, we did not address the right to protect (R2P) and truth commissions, much less second and third generation human rights. In addition,
the essay does not offer a one-size-fits-all answer to the original question of
why governments repress. Instead, as with much (social) science inquiry, it
highlights that as we as scholars dig deeper, there are evermore complexities
and myriad new questions to consider. These unforeseen issues allow us to
better understand government behavior that is as old as the government
itself. As we develop more insight into why states choose to abuse human
rights, we add not only to theoretical knowledge for its own sake, but offer
information that may be used by policy-makers in order to minimize the
(potential) harm that may be done to individuals by the governments that
are charged to protect them.
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Carver, R. (2010). A new answer to an old question: National human rights institutions and the domestication of international law. Human Rights Law Review, 10(1),
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Cingranelli, D., & Filippov, M. (2010). Electoral rules and incentives to protect human
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Clark, A. M. (2001). Diplomacy of conscience: Amnesty international and changing human
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Cole, W. M. (2009). Hard and soft commitments to human rights treaties, 1966–2000.
Sociological Forum, 24(3), 563–588.
Davenport, C. (2007a). State repression and political order. Annual Review of Political
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Davenport, C. (2007b). State repression and the domestic democratic peace. New York,
NY: Cambridge University Press.
Davenport, C., & Inman, M. (2012). The state of state repression research since the
1990s. Terrorism and Political Violence, 24(4), 619–634.
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Franklin, J. C. (2008). Shame on you: The impact of human rights criticism on political
repression in latin America. International Studies Quarterly, 52(1), 187–211.
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Goldstein, J. S., Pevehouse, J. C., Gerner, D. J., & Telhami, S. (2001). Reciprocity, triagularity, and cooperation in the middle east, 1979–1997. Journal of Conflict Resolution,
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Goodman, R., & Pegram, T. (2012). The persistent power of human rights: From commitment to compliance. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Gomez, M. (1998). Sri Lanka’s new human rights commission. Human Rights Quarterly, 20(2), 281–302.
Hathaway, O. A. (2007). Why do countries commit to human rights treaties? Journal
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Hill, D. W., Jr., (2010). Estimating the effects of human rights treaties on state behavior. Journal of Politics, 72(4), 1161–1174.
Hobbes, T. [1651] (1991). In R. Tuck (Ed.), Leviathan. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
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Keck, M. E., & Sikkink, K. (1998). Activists beyond borders: Advocacy networks in international politics. New York, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Keith, L. C., Tate, C. N., & Poe, S. C. (2009). Is the law a mere parchment barrier to
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Powell, E. J., & Staton, J. K. (2009). Domestic judicial institutions and human rights
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Rejali, D. (2007). Torture and democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Risse, T., & Ropp, S. C. (1999). International human rights norms and domestic
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Risse, T., & Sikkink, K. (1999). The socialization of international human rights norms
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The power or human rights: International norms and domestic change. New York, NY:
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Rummel, R. J. (1994). Death by government. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Sikkink, K. (2011). The justice cascade: How human rights prosecutions are changing world
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Von Stein, J. (2005). Do treaties constrain or screen? Seclection bias and treaty compliance. American Political Science Review, 99, 611–622.

FURTHER READING
Davenport, C. (2007). State repression and political order. Annual Review of Political
Science, 10, 1–23.
Goodman, R., & Pegram, T. (2011). Human rights, state compliance, and change: Assessing national human rights institutions. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Hafner-Burton, E. M. (2012). International regimes for human rights. Annual Review
of Political Science, 15, 265–286.
Hafner-Burton, E. M., Victor, D. G., & Lupu, Y. (2012). Political science research on
international law: The state of the field. The American Journal of International Law,
106(1), 47–97.
Moore, W. H. (2010). Incarceration, interrogation and counterterror: Do (Liberal)
democratic institutions constrain leviathan? PS: Political Science & Politics, 43(3),
421–424.
Simmons, B. (2009). Mobilizing for human rights: International law in domestic politics.
New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

WILL H. MOORE SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Will H. Moore is Professor of Political Science at Florida State University.
He holds a BA (Economics, 1984) and a PhD (Political Science, 1991) from

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he studied for the latter under
the direction of Ted Robert Gurr and James R. Scarritt. His research can be
found in the American Journal of Political Science, International Organization,
International Studies Quarterly, and Journal of Conflict Resolution, among other
outlets.
RYAN M. WELCH SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Ryan M. Welch is a Political Science PhD student at Florida State University,
and holds a BS (Entomology), BA (Political Science), and MS (Entomology)
from the University of Florida (2006). His research interests include human
rights, institutions, and international law.
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Why Do Governments
Abuse Human Rights?
WILL H. MOORE and RYAN M. WELCH

Abstract
Because the abuse of human beings is abhorrent, we normatively expect governments to respect those rights. However, throughout human history, abuse of human
begins has been the norm. Governments abuse rights because doing so helps leaders exercise, expand, or retain their power. Normatively, this is troubling. Yet, as
a positive matter, it should not be surprising. We begin the essay explaining why
this is so, and then turn to the question that broadly captures the research agendas
of those studying the topic of human rights: how can people constrain Leviathan?
Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, several foundational studies helped establish
a generally agreed on account that governments respond to dissent with coercion.
Domestically, democracy and economic output both reduce rights abuses, while large
populations increase repression. The impact of international characteristics is less
well developed. In fact, what is known is that the international human right regime
is complex and that norms, treaties, and international courts do not have a consistent effect on a countrys’ respect for rights. Researchers are now studying complex
relationships between domestic and international factors. For instance, the domestic
judiciary of a country influences the extent to which human rights treaties constrain
government abuse of rights. Over the coming decade, we expect scholars to produce
considerable new knowledge about the impact of norms, treaties, and international
courts on the states’ (lack of) respect for human rights.

INTRODUCTION
Given that governments own a monopoly on the legitimate use of force
within their borders, it should not surprise us that since its inception,
the states have not only repressed some of those who live within their
sovereignty claim, but have routinely done so. Yet, the dominant narrative,
especially in societies governed by democracy, is that governments do not
abuse people. It is critical to point out that this is a normative expectation,
not a positive statement about the state of the world. As human beings,
we appear to be innately inclined to tune out abuse and murder of human
beings by the government, despite the fact that, as Rummel (1994) has
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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documented, the government is the top-ranked human institution for killing
human beings. Further, as the international human rights movement has
grown, in fits and starts, from its birth during the enlightenment to become
normatively dominant since the 1970s (e.g., Hunt, 2007; Keck & Sikkink,
1998; Lauren, 1998; Tsutsui &Wotipka, 2004), governments have shifted
from being open about their abuse to actively denying and hiding it.1 The
result is that there is a remarkable disconnect between facts (governments
routinely abuse and even kill) and norms (governments must respect human
rights). We begin with a brief explanation of what human rights are, and
then explain why we should not be surprised that governments routinely
abuse them.
Acknowledging human rights means to limit the extent of the government’s ability to use coercion; examples of violations include torture,
arbitrary imprisonment and killing, genocide, spying, and harassment.2
Historically, human society became ruled by governments that spanned
considerable territory and large populations when individuals asserted a
sovereign right to govern and had both the coercive and administrative
capacity to (more or less) effectively enforce that claim. The enlightenment
period’s writings about a social contract between people and the ruler (e.g.,
Hobbes [1651] 1991; Locke [1689] 1960; Rousseau [1762] 1997) was a reaction
to that status quo, and it cannot be underemphasized how revolutionary
were those ideas. Yet, we rarely appreciated that the social contract, as presented by Hobbes, for example, implicitly views the ruler as a sort of referee
who is granted a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercion to adjudicate
disputes among people, without concern to adjudication of disputes between
people and the state. The creation of an institution that both exercises power
and has the sole authority to denude people of property, arrest, incarcerate,
try and judge, and even execute them is remarkable; yet, that is at the core
of the social contract. If such an institution is powerful enough to enforce its
claims to the above, and the human beings who exercise authority on behalf
of the state are conventional human beings susceptible to the shortcomings
to which we know human beings are susceptible, then it would be curious
indeed if abuse of human beings by government was rare. By this account,
the question shifts from the normatively driven query to a positive one: how
can human beings constrain Leviathan (Moore, 2010)? The international
human rights regime has been constructed to precisely perform that.
Though the United Nations General Assembly declared the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948, decades passed before social
1. This is most apparent in the domain of torture (Rejali, 2007).
2. This essay focuses on what are called “physical integrity of the person” rights, or “first generation”
rights. Economic, social, and cultural rights also exist, and are sometimes referred to as second and third
generation rights. Wikipedia entries, and other similar resources, provide serviceable overviews.

Why Do Governments Abuse Human Rights?

3

scientists began to study human rights violations and the effort to limit them.
Since the 1980s, however, there has been fruitful research that has led to a
number of accepted reasons for why some governments violate rights less
than others. This essay is designed to navigate the reader through the status
of current theory and findings, research that is presently being conducted,
and the direction in which the field is, and can be, headed. The rest of the
essay proceeds as follows. The following section reviews the foundational
work and its findings. From there, we explore the current state of human
rights research and how scholars have addressed some of the challenges state
repression researchers face. Lastly, we identify unresolved challenges and
suggest some directions in which future research may go.
WHAT WE KNOW
The research that has explored human rights violations in the last few
decades has yielded some results that have come to be regarded as generally
accepted. These have largely existed in two separate realms: domestic and
international factors. Some of the most cutting-edge research considers
both of these domains and their interactions, and we review it below. In
this section, we identify the few consensuses that exist in the literature. We
then discuss the domestic factors known to influence how states conduct
themselves with respect to their citizens. Following that, we review some of
the international factors that are foundational.
DOMESTIC FACTORS THAT AFFECT STATE REPRESSION
In two recent reviews, Christian Davenport usefully summarizes what we
know about the domestic sources that influence governments’ propensity to
repress (Davenport, 2007a; Davenport & Inman, 2012). The first is the behavior of those who using means that the government does not view as legitimate
to challenge policy and/or the government’s authority: dissident activity.
The second is the structures in which both the dissidents and the government
act: political institutions, macroeconomic performance, and the characteristics of the population.
Behavior: Domestic Challenges to Power. On average, states respond with coercion to challenges that they deem illegitimate: they arrest, ban, disappear,
harass, imprison, kill, and torture. Whether the dissent is illegitimate varies
across countries and with the (potential) consequences of the dissent. For
instance, some countries are more amenable to peaceful protest than others,
although even a tolerant country will resort to more coercion if that peaceful

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

movement begins to challenge the government authority in a major way. All
states view violent dissent as illegitimate, and with few exceptions it is met
with coercion. In addition, some states engage in active repression to deter
dissent: it becomes a defining feature of governance as under Stalin (e.g.,
Gregory, 2009). Thus, while the behavior of dissidents generates coercion in
all states, researchers turn to political institutions, macroeconomic performance, and population characteristics to explain both why dissident–state
interactions vary across countries and why some states actively repress in
the absence of dissent.
Political Institutions. Political institutions—how people acquire power and
how power is distributed across the government—shape the behavior of
leaders and the dissidents who would challenge them. The institution
that has drawn greatest interest is democracy, which can be defined thinly
(rule by the people) or thickly (separation of powers and civil liberties).
Davenport (2007b) reports the existence of a domestic democratic peace,
showing that elections (voice) and separation of powers (veto) each reduce
the extent to which governments turn to repression as a tool. Others have
extended the argument to civil liberties such as freedom of assembly and
speech (Little, n.d). Lastly, some work focuses on parchment institutions,
such as the provisions included in the constitution (Keith, Tate, & Poe, 2009).
Put in broad terms, democracy is best understood as a set of institutions that
alter the incentives of government officials, and Cingranelli and Filippov
(2010) provide an excellent study that shows how various characteristics of
electoral systems influence the incentives of elected officials to respect rights.
The work on the domestic democratic peace can be viewed more broadly
within the context of what is known as Selectorate Theory (Bueno de Mesquita,
Smith, Siverson, & Morrow, 2003), which argues that the defining feature of
political institutions is the proportion of the population that the leader must
keep satisfied to ensure continued tenure in office. As that number shrinks,
the state will be less constrained by a formal separation of powers, other portions of the constitution, and less concerned about succeeding in free and
fair elections. As a consequence, they will become more willing to abuse and
repress members of the population who are not members of the group they
must satisfy to remain in office.
This work begins to provide an answer to our query about tethering
Leviathan. Note that the executive branch of government is responsible for
state security, and that the military and police report to the executive. As
such, the executive is the branch of government that represses. To constrain
Leviathan, then, we must begin by making the executive accountable to as
broad a portion of society as possible via free and fair elections, separating

Why Do Governments Abuse Human Rights?

5

powers, and extending civil liberties. Note that each of these reinforces the
others: power needs to be separated to make it difficult for any actor to
rule by appealing to a small number of people; civil liberties are needed
to permit political mobilization, so that elections might be free and fair;
elections are needed to give the executive an incentive not to accumulate
power by closing other branches; and so on. Part of the answer, then, is that
political institutions can help people constrain Leviathan. As it turns out,
however, there is more we can say.
Scholarly interest in another domestic institution, the national human
rights institution (NHRI), has recently emerged. Most of the work on
NHRIs to this point has been by legal scholars, but social scientists such
as sociologists and political scientists are starting to examine them as well.
NHRIs are domestic institutions that have some mandate to protect and/or
enhance the human rights of the citizens of the state in which they are
established (Carver, 2010). They operate in an unusual space between the
government and civil society. Being established by the government, they
work with and are often financed by both the government and NGOs. This
causes independence to be a constant challenge for NHRIs, as they are
established and (at least partially) financed by the very government that
they are to keep in check (Mertus, 2009).
Goodman and Pegram (2011) note that since the Paris Principles were
defined in 1991, there has been a remarkable cascade of states adopting
them at a rate of over five per year. Democratizing states have done so in
part owing to pressure from the democratic states, and others in an effort
to become legitimate members of the international community (Reif, 2000).
Some work has been done on which types of states establish NHRIs (Koo &
Ramirez, 2009) and how specific NHRIs operate (e.g., Gomez, 1998; Mertus,
2009; Okafor & Agbakwa, 2002; Parlevliet, Lamb, & Maloka, 2005), but we
have yet to find out their effects on state repression as a whole; a recent
edited volume by Goodman and Pegram (2012) is an excellent place to learn
more about what we do know, and what questions scholars ought to explore.
Macroeconomic Performance. Scholars widely believe that the state of the
economy—overall output, growth, inflation, and unemployment—influences
government repression. Yet, empirical work has established but one robust
relationship: a negative cross-sectional correlation between output (e.g.,
gross domestic product) and repression. Many studies also report a correlation between other macroeconomic indicators and repression, but an equally
large number fail to find such a correlation. The major weakness with this
work is that little of it engages the dissent–repression literature and makes
a theoretical case about the expected equilibrium outcome of a change in

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

various indicators of macroeconomic performance. For example, many
argue that rising inflation and unemployment will generate dissent, but are
silent about how governments are going to react to that dissent. What we
know about the impact of political institutions on repression suggests that
governments’ use of coercion is likely to vary across political institutions (as
will levels and types of dissent); yet, existing research has to theoretically
engage those processes. As such, the standard use of macroeconomic output
is as a control variable, and a robust negative correlation exists across a
remarkable array of research designs and specifications.
Population Characteristics. Like macroeconomic performance, the impact of
the characteristics of populations—especially size and heterogeneity across
class, ethnic, linguistic, racial, and religious categories—on repression have
been the focus of considerable scientific study. Also, like macroeconomic performance, only one indicator produces robust findings across studies: the size
of the population (larger countries have greater repression, on average). Our
reaction to the mixed findings on the heterogeneity of populations is much
the same as it is toward the mixed findings regarding macroeconomic performance: government repression (and dissident activity) is not homogeneous
across political institutions and the challenges the government receives. This,
then, is another excellent area for theoretical development.
INTERNATIONAL FACTORS THAT AFFECT STATE REPRESSION
Having sketched the main findings of the influence of domestic characteristics on repression, we turn our attention to outlining what we know about
the impact of behavior and structures outside the state. Behavior includes
the activities of other states, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), and
international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs). Structures include
international law and the position of states within political and economic
networks.
Diplomacy and Coercion. States use a mix of both diplomacy and coercion to
influence one another. A small literature exists that explores the impact of
other country’s behavior on a given country’s repressive activity, although
it has become dated and left little impact. Moore (1995; Moore & Davis,
1998) conducted an events data analysis to show that the conflictual and
cooperative behavior of both sponsor states and neighboring states impacted
the Rhodesian and Zairean governments’ hostility toward dissidents (controlling for the dissidents’ behavior). Goldstein and Pevehouse (1997;
Goldstein, Pevehouse, Gerner, &Telhami, 2001; Pevehouse & Goldstein,

Why Do Governments Abuse Human Rights?

7

1999) conducted similar studies of the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts, as well
as the Israeli—Palestinian conflicts, and similarly found that the dynamics
of dissent and repression are influenced by the foreign policy behavior of
other governments. Unfortunately, this work has stimulated little in the way
of follow-up and has not influenced other work on government repression.
INGOs and Naming and Shaming. As noted above, it is well established that
a social movement of activists, diplomats, and lawyers3 produced, in the
latter half of the twentieth century, a human rights regime (Hunt, 2007; Keck
& Sikkink, 1998; Lauren, 1998; Tsutsui & Wotipka, 2004) that made claims
which specifically limited the state’s ability to use coercion (e.g., Donnelly,
2004, pp. 1–53). The movement first established, both normatively and then
legally, that these human rights exist: the state could not arbitrarily arrest or
detain people, denude them of property, torture them, and so on. The major
tool that the movement used to first create those norms and later advocate
for legal instruments and then compliance with the norms and laws was to
name and shame violators: publicly advance allegations of states’ abuse of
people (e.g., Clark, 2001).
Does naming and shaming work? A primary role of INGOs is to shed light
on the repressive, often secretive, behavior of governments around the world.
If leaders care about their international reputation, public censuring should
add an additional cost to consider before repressing.4 INGOs often make
repression more visible by alerting international media to focus on the state
in question (Keck & Sikkink, 1998). This mechanism assumes that other states
will condemn leaders for the way in which they treat their citizens. Another
mechanism that has been theorized is that INGOs provide information about
abuses in a given country to another country’s citizens that detest repression
and have the ability to lobby their government to intervene5 in the country where abuses are taking place (Risse & Sikkink, 1999). Yet another way
in which INGOs are believed to increase the cost of repression is by offering resources to domestic movements on the ground (Risse & Ropp, 1999).
These resources allow domestic groups to better organize, making them a
more credible threat to the government, whether the ensuing protest is violent or nonviolent (Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011; Murdie & Bhasin, 2011). This
mechanism is highly effective when there are human rights INGOs in the
neighboring states and the borders are relatively open (Bell, Murdie, & Chad
Clay, 2012). Although INGOs lean on naming and shaming as their primary
3. Who were inspired by the parchment institutions produced during the American and French Revolutions (and the Enlightenment, more generally).
4. Or, following the principal–agent logic, the additional cost should give the leader more incentive
to make sure repression does not happen on his watch.
5. Intervention can include public condemnation, economic sanctions, and/or military action.

8

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

means of reducing human rights abuse, there is some research that suggests
other groups—NGOs, religious groups, and foreign governments6 —may be
more effective at using this tool (Franklin, 2008). Further research on who is
and how naming and shaming is performed is in order to advance our understanding of the effect of international reputation and human rights abuses.
International Law. What of international law? The research done on international law focuses on international treaties, and the monitoring and sanctioning mechanisms they create. Studies of the nine different core human rights
treaties7 have yielded disparate results. When correlation with state behavior is discovered, its direction tends to vary depending on which treaty and
which rights are being studied. Therefore, there are an increasing number of
studies that say that international human rights treaties are related to better,
worse, or no change in human rights practices. The theoretical underpinnings
of this research are still being debated. Those that find treaties correlated
with no effect on human rights practices view treaties as meaningless scraps
of paper that, if they do anything, screen which countries planned on (not)
violating human rights to begin with (Downs, Rocke, & Barsoom, 1996; Von
Stein, 2005).
Some empirical results suggest treaties have an effect (Hill, 2010; Simmons,
2009). For this reason, scholars are now starting to look into what makes
different treaties different and how that affects ratification and state repression. So far, it has been found that when treaties impose greater costs on
governments, such as the more stringent rules of many optional protocols,
they more effectively protect human rights (Cole, 2009). Examples of treaty
content that would impose these greater costs are the allowance of more,
unannounced monitoring of institutions in which human rights abuses may
occur; state-to-state complaints; or individual petitions. So far, it seems that
treaty rules are more important than treaty substance (such as which rights
are protected) in affecting state repressiveness.
Law works best when it can be enforced. Some indict international law on
the grounds that states can break the law with impunity. International human
rights law is particularly hard to enforce because mechanisms such as reciprocity do not apply. With human rights issues, if state x abuses its citizens,
6. Although INGOs can bring foreign governments into the foray.
7. The nine core UN human rights treaties are: the International Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965), International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1966), Convention on the Elimination of All
forms of Discrimination against Women (1979), Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman
or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984), Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families
(1990), Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006), and International Convention for the
Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (2006).

Why Do Governments Abuse Human Rights?

9

state y cannot reciprocate in order to get compliance from state x by abusing
its own citizens.
A number of international and regional courts/tribunals have been established to address the enforcement concern.8 These include the International
Criminal Court, the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American
Court of Human Rights, and the African Court on Human and Peoples’
Rights, etc. Some scholars view courts and tribunals as opportunities to
sharpen the teeth of international law. Others argue that the potential for
an impending trial may make leaders who are committing violent actions
against their citizens more willing to violate rights, as they no longer have
the option of “retiring” to a friendly country, and thus will fight tooth and
claw to retain power. For now, the empirical record is mixed. Sikkink (2011)
finds that international courts and tribunals do, in fact, decrease the number
of human rights abuses perpetuated by states, while Meernik, Nichols, and
King (2010) find that they have no impact on human rights behavior. The
research that finds no impact is done on states after civil war, which may be
a situation in which it is harder to attain respect for human rights because
of the potential recurrence of violence.9 We have much more to learn about
the impact of international courts and tribunals on governments’ (lack of)
respect for rights.
THE CURRENT AND FUTURE STATE OF STATE REPRESSION
RESEARCH
The study of state repression forces scholars to straddle the fence between
comparative politics and international relations. The abuses happen within
the border of the state, but if domestic politics and institutions and international regimes and nongovernmental organizations influence these outcomes. Scholars have increasingly recognized the importance of taking into
account both realms––domestic and international––of politics in order to better understand why states repress their citizens, and what can be done to
minimize this.
A budding line of research explores how domestic institutions allow
international institutions to be more effective on the ground. One of the
more fleshed out of these research programs is that of domestic courts’
ability to make international treaties work for the citizens within countries
(Hathaway, 2007; Lupu, 2013; Powell & Staton, 2009). Descriptive and formal
theory suggests that states that ratify international treaties, such as the UN
8. The international tribunals that have been established are the International Criminal Tribunals for
the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the Extraordinary Chambers in
the Courts of Cambodia, and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon.
9. After all, some researchers have found that countries involved in civil war abuse human rights
more often (Poe & Tate, 1994; Poe, Tate, & Camp Keith, 1999).

10

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

treaties discussed above, are more constrained in their repressive behavior,
because the domestic legal system makes sure that if the treaty is violated,
there are potential domestic legal sanctions waiting for those that violated
or issued the violation. Different authors stress different characteristics of
the judiciary. But, whether it is judicial independence, effectiveness, power,
or some combination of these aspects, the empirical record supports the
theoretical propositions.
Given the discussion about the judiciary’s effect on ratification of treaties,
might other interactions between domestic and international institutions be
important? If a state ratifies a human rights treaty, NHRIs may be able to constrain the behavior of the state too. NHRIs are a heterogeneous bunch, but
they all perform some combination of the following: monitoring, education,
receiving individual complaints, legal recommendation, and publishing allegations and judicial results. One can see how the unique position that NHRIs
hold between government and civil society make them a potential domestic
institution to delegate some of the human rights responsibilities agreed to in
international treaties.
Perhaps, other important interactions exist. For instance, might INGOs
be more effective working with NHRIs? Perhaps, INGOs working on the
ground can help a state hold true to its international agreements. Effective
domestic judiciaries may have interesting effects on international courts
and tribunals––perhaps making them less necessary, making their rulings
more effective, or some combination of these. Just as scholars looked at the
independent effects of institutions, and just recently started considering
their interactions, it may be time for scholars to look at more complex
interactions with three or more institutions. The groundwork was set with
classic studies on what effects state repression. It is now incumbent on us as
researchers to dig deeper, asking more complex questions.
CONSIDERATIONS FOR MOVING FORWARD
Now that we have surveyed the classic literature and the current state of
affairs, it is important to recognize what can be done to keep the state repression research relevant and fruitful. In this section, we consider where repression research may want to peer and the data and methodological challenges
that may be waiting for brave researchers.
CONCEPTUALIZING REPRESSION: DISAGGREGATION AND SUBSTITUTION
Pioneering research on repression focused mostly on political and civil rights.
From there, scholars started to explore physical integrity rights such as torture, genocide, political imprisonment, and disappearing. The Cingranelli

Why Do Governments Abuse Human Rights?

11

and Richards data set (CIRI) disaggregates both groups of rights, that is, there
are measures for speech freedom, religious freedom, etc. for political–civil
rights, and the four examples above (substituting extrajudicial killing for
genocide) that make up physical integrity rights. Often, researchers aggregate them into their respective indices. Some are starting to look at different
types of rights violations as their outcomes of interest, and more should continue to do so. After all, the causal mechanism for why a state would violate
an individual’s right to practice religion freely may very well differ from the
mechanism for why a state would violate its workers’ rights. Researchers
that disaggregate the repression activities often focus on one type of violation, that is, torture. However, researchers would be wise to consider that
governments have a whole palette of repression at their disposal. They may
use one to substitute for another, depending on the institutional, political, or
cultural environment. This point brings up two considerations. First, some
studies that have looked at one type of repression may find a decrease in that
outcome, but the story may not be as positive as it seems, as a government
may substitute another form of repression. This may occur when one type of
repression, such as torture, is high on the monitoring radar, but others are not.
The second point stems from the first. There are other types of repression that
are not captured in the most commonly used indices, for instance, surveillance, spying, and harassment. It is important to theorize about which types
of repression will be used when, and what strategies governments may use to
continue repressing. From there, it may be important to collect data on repressive activities that have yet to be considered, such as spying. Although spying
is an innately secret activity, making data collection difficult, it is incumbent
on us as honest, thorough researchers to be creative and diligent when considering these tough questions and situations.
DIGGING DEEPER: EXAMINING REPRESSION THROUGH A MORE POWERFUL LENS
As the scholarship on state repression continues, some researchers may wish
to examine some of the general theories with more fine-toothed combs in
order to discover important details. For instance, if the outcome of interest is
one type of repression, the substitution issues discussed directly above also
apply. Torture is the clearest example of this concern. Since the monitoring
of states’ torture practices began, governments have devised ways to torture
that are harder to observe (Rejali, 2007). Sometimes referred to as clean torture,
these practices do not leave visible marks on the body of the victim, making
accusation a he said/she said affair. By recognizing this and coming up with
new, creative data and methods, scholars may be able to probe deeper into
government repression strategies.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

New data and methods may also be necessary for discovering more specific patterns of government behavior. For instance, most studies to date use
the country–year as the unit of analysis. This decision carries with it important assumptions, both spatially and temporally. With regards to the spatial
assumption, researchers that are interested in the interaction between dissent
and repression that use the country–year as the unit of analysis assume that
the dissent that happens in one place in the country effects the repression
in another. For instance, there is a good chance that dissent in Boston, MA
is not related to the repression of rights that happen in the same year in Los
Angeles, CA. Also, with respect to time, if one is concerned with how governments and citizens react to one another’s actions, it is hard to tease out any
specifics when everything that happens in a year is not picked apart more
scrupulously. Perhaps, it is time for researchers to focus on specific regions,
countries, districts, cities, etc. in order to get more time data at the level of
quarter, month, week, etc.
CONCLUSION
Why do states repress the rights of their own citizens? This essay has
addressed that question by reviewing the foundational research. From there,
we shone spotlights on the most current research that is doing the most to
push the field. Finally, we offered suggestions as to where research may or
should be heading in order to better understand why governments repress.
Given space constraints, we cannot address all the merits comment. For
instance, we did not address the right to protect (R2P) and truth commissions, much less second and third generation human rights. In addition,
the essay does not offer a one-size-fits-all answer to the original question of
why governments repress. Instead, as with much (social) science inquiry, it
highlights that as we as scholars dig deeper, there are evermore complexities
and myriad new questions to consider. These unforeseen issues allow us to
better understand government behavior that is as old as the government
itself. As we develop more insight into why states choose to abuse human
rights, we add not only to theoretical knowledge for its own sake, but offer
information that may be used by policy-makers in order to minimize the
(potential) harm that may be done to individuals by the governments that
are charged to protect them.
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FURTHER READING
Davenport, C. (2007). State repression and political order. Annual Review of Political
Science, 10, 1–23.
Goodman, R., & Pegram, T. (2011). Human rights, state compliance, and change: Assessing national human rights institutions. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Hafner-Burton, E. M. (2012). International regimes for human rights. Annual Review
of Political Science, 15, 265–286.
Hafner-Burton, E. M., Victor, D. G., & Lupu, Y. (2012). Political science research on
international law: The state of the field. The American Journal of International Law,
106(1), 47–97.
Moore, W. H. (2010). Incarceration, interrogation and counterterror: Do (Liberal)
democratic institutions constrain leviathan? PS: Political Science & Politics, 43(3),
421–424.
Simmons, B. (2009). Mobilizing for human rights: International law in domestic politics.
New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

WILL H. MOORE SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Will H. Moore is Professor of Political Science at Florida State University.
He holds a BA (Economics, 1984) and a PhD (Political Science, 1991) from

16

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he studied for the latter under
the direction of Ted Robert Gurr and James R. Scarritt. His research can be
found in the American Journal of Political Science, International Organization,
International Studies Quarterly, and Journal of Conflict Resolution, among other
outlets.
RYAN M. WELCH SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Ryan M. Welch is a Political Science PhD student at Florida State University,
and holds a BS (Entomology), BA (Political Science), and MS (Entomology)
from the University of Florida (2006). His research interests include human
rights, institutions, and international law.
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Why Do Governments Abuse Human Rights?