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Political Competition and Authoritarian Repression

Evidence from Pinochet's Chile

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2022

Pearce Edwards Open the ORCID record for Pearce Edwards [Opens in a new window]
Pearce Edwards*
Affiliation:
Institute for Politics and Strategy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USAE-mail: pearcee@andrew.cmu.edu
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Abstract

Authoritarian regimes repress to prevent mass resistance to their rule. In doing so, regimes’ security forces require information about the dissidents who mobilize such resistance. Political competition, which fuels partisan rivalries, offers one solution to this problem by motivating civilians to provide needed information to security forces. Yet civilians share information about any political opponents, not just dissidents, which creates a challenge for regimes that want to target dissidents. Drawing on novel archival data from the immediate aftermath of the 1973 coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile, a period that included civilian collaboration with repression, this article presents evidence that close pre-coup political competition is associated with more frequent repression and more targeting of non-dissidents. The author uses pre-coup democratic elections to measure political competition and addresses the challenge of estimating political preferences unaffected by repression. Qualitative evidence and further quantitative tests probe implications of the partisan rivalry mechanism and account for alternative explanations.

Keywords

authoritarianismelectionsLatin Americamilitary couppolitical violencerepression
Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 74 , Issue 4 , October 2022 , pp. 479 - 522
Copyright
Copyright © 2022 Trustees of Princeton University

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