Daniel Hill, University of Georgia, dwhill@uga.edu
Andreas Beger, Predictive Heuristics
Abstract
The literature on government violence focuses primarily on the repression of dissent. But not all state violence targets groups who oppose the government. Much of it targets criminal suspects, immigrants, and other marginalized groups who are not perceived to be challenging the government’s authority. The vast majority of findings concerning state violence comes from analyses that do not distinguish between government violence that targets acts of dissent and violence used for other purposes. Because of this, we have not yet established many empirical facts about the relationship between domestic institutions and violence that is unrelated to the repression of dissent. Though various political and legal institutions are known to reduce the frequency of torture and other violent abuses, it is unclear whether these effects are attributable to reductions in repressive violence, non-repressive violence, or both. We argue that, with respect to non-repressive violence, domestic legal institutions designed to protect the rights of individuals are more important than the political institutions, such as electoral competition, typically associated with democracy. We use the Ill Treatment and Torture data, which can be disaggregated by victim type, to explore the relationship between the torture of criminal suspects and marginalized social groups, and various domestic legal institutions, including judicial independence, legal system type, and constitutional provisions related to arrest and trial procedure.
Presented at ISA 2018, April 4-7, San Francisco (this commit)
Replication materials are in a public repo at https://github.com/andybega/cmps-itt