The Dynamic Relationship Between Protest and Repression

Abstract

This study contributes to our understanding of the dynamic relationship between protest and repression. It employs vector autoregressions to analyze daily data from six Latin American and three African countries from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. The results suggest that there is a reciprocal relationship between protest and repression and that protest is consistent over time. Democracies were found to be most likely to accommodate the opposition and, at the same time, were least likely to display continuous repressive behavior. However, if faced with popular dissent, democracies were just as likely to respond with negative sanctions as other regime types, whereas negative sanctions were particularly unsuccessful to solicit dissident cooperation in democracies.