Repressing for reputation

Abstract

When do leaders use repression? Leadership transitions disrupt the relationship between regime and citizens, introducing uncertainty about whether the state will use force to put down dissent. This shock to the equilibrium level of repression and dissent threatens the survival of new leaders by inviting challenges, incentivizing them to build a deterrent reputation. Investing in repression early allows a rapid re-equilibration, leading to a decrease in the probability of increased repression as a leader gains experience in office. Some leaders, therefore, have a reason to put down dissent early in their tenure to clearly establish a reputation for toughness, one that exists distinct from that of the state or the regime. These dynamics surface only for leaders that break with the prior regime. Those closely linked to the existing order can draw upon an established reputation and need not develop their own. Statistical analyses of changes in repression intensity from 1990 to 2005 reveal strong support for the argument. Breaks with the prior regime produce a short-term increase in repression, but leaders who come to power via such transitions become less likely to change the level of coercion the longer they remain in office. Leaders tied directly to the prior administration exhibit neither tendency.

Keywords

leaders repression reputation

Introduction

In 2004, Mikheil Saakashvili won the presidential election in Georgia. Saakashvili immediately put pressure on the autonomous region of Adjara, forcing the local leader’s resignation. Empowered by this success, he also ramped up efforts in South Ossetia, employing the police force to shut down black markets and curtail antigovernment activities. Although Saakashvili ultimately failed to bring the South Ossetians and Abkhazians to heel, his intensification of state repression shortly after taking office reflects a deep need to consolidate his power and create the impression of a new toughness in Tblisi.

Leaders often justify repressive actions in terms of threat, but we assert that repression serves an additional function. Saakashvili came to power democratically, elected to replace a disgraced, corrupt, Soviet-style leader. Yet, he expended resources to clearly signal to civilian adversaries that he would not face their challenges sitting down. Coercive force allowed him to demonstrate his strength and resolve. Repression and dissent are intrinsically linked (Lichbach, 1987; Moore, 1998, 2000; Carey, 2006; Ritter, 2014). Potential dissidents weigh the probability of violent response when deciding whether to challenge the state. Leaders consider the likely civilian response when choosing whether to alter policy. In a situation featuring such repeated interactions, forward-looking, survival-driven leaders would benefit greatly from a reputation that deters challenges (Milgrom & Roberts, 1982; Kreps & Wilson, 1982). When leadership transitions introduce uncertainty, new leaders must establish their own reputation. Repression can serve such leaders’ effort to build a domestic reputation for toughness that will deter future challenges and protect their position in power (Rasler, 1996; Moore, 1998; Carey, 2006).

Contributing to a growing trend (e.g. Horowitz & Stam, 2014; Danneman & Ritter, 2014; Chiozza & Goemans, 2011; Wolford, 2007; Saunders, 2011; Fuhrmann & Horowitz, 2014), we build our theory around the incentives and decisions of leaders rather than those of states or regimes. As has been argued with respect to international politics (Wolford, 2007; Gelpi & Grieco, 2001), we contend that leadership change introduces uncertainty regarding resolve. In the repression–dissent game, regimes are not faceless machines. In most cases, the executive is highly visible and holds considerable power to determine the level of repression employed. Executive turnovers open windows of uncertainty regarding the leader’s type. These transitions constitute a shock to the strategic system of domestic dissent and repression. An untested leader may be more willing to offer concessions, or may be even tougher than the previous executive. Because opposition actors would benefit from knowing which is the case, new leaders anticipate probing challenges that could easily inflict unacceptable costs. The uncertainty that emerges from breaks with the prior regime thus produces a short-term incentive for leaders to increase repression. Leaders who dispel uncertainty by establishing a reputation for toughness in this initial period will become less likely to increase repression levels over the course of their tenure.

The reputation-based incentive to repress stems from more than just turnover per se. As acknowledged in the literature, a more nuanced understanding of leaders’ characteristics and contexts improves our understanding of many phenomena, including conflict decisionmaking and domestic institutional change (Besley, Montalvo & Reynal-Querol, 2011; Colgan, 2013; Gift & Krcmaric, 2017). Our theory contributes to this research on leader characteristics, emphasizing a new source of variance. We conceptualize challenger turnovers as those in which the population will be the most uncertain about leaders’ resolve, creating the most intense incentives for reputation-building. A leader who either enters power irregularly or hails from an opposition faction has the most to prove, and will more likely repress early to build a reputation for toughness.

We test our hypotheses regarding the effects of transitions and leader tenure using new data on repression and leaders. We construct a nuanced measure of the change in intensity of repression from month to month. This operationalization allows us to evaluate the potentially very short-term effects of leadership transition. More traditional measures of human rights violations aggregate regime characteristics over entire years, which, as we show below, would make it impossible to detect the effects of transitions.¹ We also incorporate new data on the nature of leadership turnover. Rather than changes in the overall form of government, our theory emphasizes uncertainty regarding individual leaders’ resolve. Licht’s (2014) Regular Turnover Details dataset allows us to identify those leadership turnovers which introduce the greatest uncertainty by isolating two vital dimensions of a succession: the relationship between ingoing and outgoing leaders, and the nature of the turnover itself.

Our statistical analysis reveals evidence of reputation-building. Repression intensifies significantly during the initial months following challenger transitions. Because the information gap is greatest for leaders who enter irregularly or who had no role in the prior administration, reputation-building offers these leaders greater benefits. After the initial period, these leaders become less likely to increase repression the longer they endure in office. Transitions featuring a smooth continuation of the prior regime’s authority do not stimulate increased repression, and heirs to power are no more likely to heighten coercion early in their career than they are later. Other factors drive the choice of repression levels when leaders can draw upon the prior regime’s well-established reputation rather than building their own.

The value of reputation

Traditionally, scholars conceptualize reputation as an enduring characteristic of states (Schelling, 1966), but scholarship on resolve has shifted away from states and towards individual leaders (McGillivray & Smith, 2000; Guisinger & Smith, 2002; Wolford, 2007). Pinning reputation to individual leaders introduces variation within states: executive transitions wipe the slate, and leaders’ reputations develop over the course of their tenures. Formal models demonstrate the importance of leader-specific dynamics for testing theories of reputation and credibility (Guisinger & Smith, 2002; Sartori, 2005; Wolford, 2007), and empirical work supports these conclusions (Gelpi & Feaver, 2002; Horowitz, McDermott & Stam, 2005; Chiozza & Choi, 2003). We engage this literature on leader-specific reputations, extending it to the domestic sphere and adding nuance to the conceptualization of transition.

For our purposes, leaders value the deterrent capacity of a reputation for repression.² Reputations can be invested in and built up (Guisinger & Smith, 2002; Sartori, 2005). Such reputation-building behavior emerges ‘where individuals are unsure about one another’s options or motivations and where they deal with each other repeatedly in related circumstances’ (Milgrom & Roberts, 1982 quoted in Walter, 2009). These circumstances incentivize reputation-building, because the horizon of future interactions threatens future costs for those whose opponents are either uncertain or convinced that they face a weak type. Such circumstances clearly exist between new leaders and potential dissidents.

Scholars of IR are familiar with the role of reputation in international crises. Reputations perform a similar function in domestic politics: leaders use and threaten force in the present to discourage future challenges. In domestic politics, repression achieves this goal through heightened perceptions of the cost of dissent, thus raising the costs of collective action and decreasing its probability. Investing in a reputation for repression shortens the equilibration process during which the population and the new leader attempt to learn each other’s type. Below, we build on this central idea, proposing a theory of the reputation-based incentive to repress.

A theory of repression as reputation building

Depending on the circumstances and institutional constraints leaders may make concessions, co-opt their opponents, or repress them (Gandhi & Przeworski, 2006; Conrad, 2011). Because of the trade-off between force and long-term stability (Levi, 1988), leaders often prefer to use less forceful options if dissident actions do not pose an immediate threat to the regime (Geddes, 2005; Gandhi & Przeworski, 2006; Carey, 2010). Material and policy concessions may limit the will to dissent, but they also cost money, and can open the door to further policy demands, threatening a leader’s position in the longer term. Balancing these concerns, leaders typically respond with a mix of beneficent and repressive tactics (Conrad, 2011). In this work, however, we focus on when leaders’ incentives encourage repression as a tool for reputation-building.³

We define repression as any policy taken by the state which limits the freedom of citizens to express discontent or which imposes costs upon those who do. Costs may be actively imposed or merely threatened. Repression is not simply switched on or off: it ranges widely in intensity, both across states and within states over time. Following other works (Wintrobe, 1998; Davenport, 2007a; Ritter, 2014), our understanding of repression encompasses many activities. Repression need not escalate to the level of violent physical integrity violations to qualify. The specific repressive tool chosen by leaders may depend on their institutional context, the level of perceived threat, and historical precedent. Within democratic states, for example, repression may tend towards restrictions rather than outright violence (Davenport, 2007b), be targeted at historically marginalized groups as the history of state treatment of Native American and African American populations in the USA illustrates, or rely on a narrative of national security threat as in US treatment of suspected communist sympathizers or Saakashvili’s focus on the rebellious South Ossetian and Abkhazian territories described in the introduction. Following a profitable new theoretical approach in the repression literature, we emphasize the incentives of leaders rather than the constraining role of institutions (Young, 2009; Ritter, 2014).⁴

Building on the idea of leader-specific reputations, we examine reputational dynamics between new leaders and their citizens. To do so we make some basic assumptions about the motivations of leaders and opposition actors as well as the nature of their interactions. First, we adopt the idea that leaders prioritize remaining in power. Leaders accomplish this by providing desired policies to relevant constituencies through an efficient use of available resources. Further, we assume no policy exists that would satiate all organized elements of the population.

Domestic politics consists of competition over policy and resources between the regime and the opposition. Because political decisions imply distributive consequences (Pierskalla, 2010), some latent discontent always exists; even in democratic politics, someone loses (see Arena & Nicoletti, 2014). Thus, all leaders, regardless of institutional context, must balance not only which policies to provide, but also how to deal with the inevitable dissent against enacted policies.

Under normal circumstances, a leader’s interactions with the opposition need not involve active coercion. Both government forces and opposition actors prefer to expend the least resources possible. Since coercion is expensive, any regime will attempt to maintain social order and its own survival while practicing as little repression as possible (Gartner & Regan, 1996). The opposition, on the other hand, prefers to challenge the regime up to the point where the violence of its response outweighs any expected policy benefits (Davenport, 2007a).

An ‘optimal’ level of repression is determined through repeated interactions between the regime and opposition (Moore, 2000). This equilibration happens as each party updates expectations about the other side’s willingness and ability to inflict heavy costs. If all parties knew the ‘right’ demand to level against their opposite, equilibration would be unnecessary. Information about the other party’s willingness to inflict and to suffer costs – that is, that party’s ‘type’ – is essential to the peaceful conduct of domestic affairs. Reputation is a shorthand for this phenomenon: to signal or disseminate information about one’s type is to invest in a reputation, the benefit of which is that one need not continuously engage in costly activities.

Repression offers leaders a way to influence the beliefs held by their nascent opposition, that is, to build a reputation. Opposition movements face a significant collective action problem (Davenport, Johnston & Mueller, 2005; Olson, 1965). If repressive tactics increase the costs individuals expect to suffer, then the overall level of dissent may be controlled. By raising the expected costs of dissent through threatened or manifested coercion, leaders can signal their resolve to those believed to pose a threat, preventing the need to grant concessions or to employ higher levels of coercion in the future. Because of the risks of prompting violent backlash, however, leaders must carefully consider what the opposition is likely to do, what the opposition expects the regime to do, and how the chosen strategy will affect opposition beliefs about the regime’s willingness to use force (Ritter, 2014).

Leadership change fundamentally disrupts the repression–dissent equilibrium within a state.⁵ Domestically, regimes are not faceless machines. Chief executives are highly visible to the opposition, and usually hold considerable influence over the level of repression that will be employed. Beliefs about the regime’s propensity to repress are largely beliefs about the leader’s propensity to repress. Leadership transitions, then, introduce uncertainty about the resolve of the state to use force. Will the new executive behave in the same way as her predecessor? Does this leadership transition constitute an opportunity to achieve new policy gains for the opposition? After a transfer of power, only the leader knows for sure.

Such uncertainty raises the specter of opportunistic challenges from the opposition: the demands lodged may be more extreme than if more information were available. Uncertainty incentivizes this risky behavior in two ways. First, the opposition could perceive some chance of receiving the bigger gains. Second, making a large demand can partially screen the new leaders, forcing some information revelation (e.g. Wolford, 2007).

This dynamic is undesirable for new leaders. They would prefer to establish their reputations on their own terms, before the opposition voices provocative demands. Leaders do not need an explicit challenge to invest in their reputation (see Danneman & Ritter, 2014; Sullivan, 2015; Nordås & Davenport, 2013). Command of the state apparatus and attention from the media allow new leaders to tighten security in public places, issue ominous threats against ‘ruffians’ and ‘terrorists’, initiate investigations of political organizers, etc. By moving first, the new leader can choose how much to increase repression, rather than having to respond to whatever level of dissent the opposition mobilizes.⁶

In general, deterrence costs less than compellence (Schelling, 1966). This may be particularly true in the repression–dissent dynamic. Once a major challenge has been mounted, the regime must expend significantly more resources to regain order than would have been required to deter the opposition in the first place (Hibbs, 1973). Mobilizing opposition to the regime is costly, requiring significant organizational effort from a small, motivated core (Hibbs, 1973). Judicious signaling could raise the expected costs of public protest beyond what those more prone to free-ride would be willing to pay. Targeted repression can disrupt or uproot the opposition, making it difficult to mount major challenges (Jenkins & Perrow, 1977; Sullivan, 2015).

The unpredictability of large-scale opposition, once mobilized, justifies such investments. Even relatively modest protest events can cascade into widespread disorder (Granovetter, 1978; Kuran, 1989). Recent work suggests that forward-looking regimes both anticipate situations of heightened protest potential and take pre-emptive action to quash nascent unrest (Sullivan, 2015). Danneman & Ritter (2014) demonstrate this dynamic in the context of regional civil conflict diffusion, and Nordås & Davenport (2013) connect it to ‘youth bulges’. Leader transition’s uncertainty may also warrant pre-emptive action.

The benefits of moving first, though, do not mean that new leaders will demur in the face of a screening challenge. For the same strategic reason that untested leaders expect probing challenges, these new executives will also be particularly likely to respond with force if the challenges surface. Part of the appeal of repression as a means of dispelling uncertainty regarding the regime’s resolve is that, if used judiciously, it ought to facilitate a rapid equilibration of both dissent and repression. Even a relatively modest boost in repressive policy could be enough to disrupt collective action efforts by dissuading the least resolved of the citizenry. The most resolved of the civilian opposition can be expected to maintain its activities, and the regime will respond in (newly) predictable ways. Repression will not disappear. It may not even return to pre-transition levels, but it will remain relatively stable. If, instead, a screening challenge revealed a lack of resolve, further demands of escalating cost would be expected. Rather than a quick equilibration, concession in the face of a screening challenge could lead to multiple rounds of crisis.

This discussion has oversimplified, treating all leadership transitions as equivalently destabilizing. Variation in transitions translates to varying levels of uncertainty. Some leaders coast smoothly into power after a long and prominent career within the established regime. We refer to such figures as ‘heirs to power’. This low-uncertainty status emerges from two dimensions of the turnover: placement in the prior administration and the means of entry. A prominent post in the prior administration may have allowed the incoming leader to disseminate information about his or her type ahead of inauguration. If their predecessors clearly demonstrated that all challenges will be violently put down, such characters need not invest resources in building a reputation for repression. Potential dissidents have more information about a leader who has strong ties to the prior regime. Indeed, these leaders may not even be perceived as ‘new’, provided they enter through regular channels.

The means of leader replacement constitutes a second dimension of being an heir. When power transfers smoothly and voluntarily between the incoming and outgoing leader, the process itself indicates to the opposition that the regime remains firmly entrenched and resolved. This is not always how actors tied to a prior administration come to power, however. Incumbents can lose the confidence of their political party and be forced out in the wake of scandal or protest; shifting factions within a junta may call for new leadership without dissolving the overall regime. In either case, leaders directly tied to the prior regime can enter through a process that leaves citizens uncertain whether to expect business as usual or a reorientation of state–society dynamics.

Heirs to power, then, have political ties to the prior regime and enter through a smooth transfer of power. The incentive to repress for reputation-building is strongest for leaders that break with the prior regime, either through a legal process that ushers in the opposition or through an irregular turnover. We refer to such events as ‘challenger turnovers’ or ‘breaks with the prior administration’, and occasionally we will call the figures that enter this way ‘challengers’.

This logic implies the following testable hypotheses:

H1: Leadership transition prompts short-term increases in the level of repression if new leaders are not heirs to power.

H2: Changes in level of repression decline over the course of leader tenure if the leader is not an heir to power.

As an illustration of the proposed dynamics, consider two very different leadership transitions: the transfer of power from father to son in Syria in 2000, and the ouster of Mubarak by his former defense minister, Mohamed Hussein Tantawi.⁷

Bashar al-Assad, second son of Hafez, inherited his role following the accidental death of his elder brother. Shortly after the fatal crash, Hafez summoned Bashar home and placed him prominently in the public view. As early as 1997 posters displayed the visages of Bashar and his dead brother, proclaiming the remaining son as ‘the Future’ (Jehl, 1999). As his health began to fail, Hafez al-Assad acted to further signal who his successor would be, placing Bashar in posts that allowed him to establish a reputation for toughness. He ousted a long-serving previous prime minister as part of an ‘anticorruption drive’, which ‘purged a number of formerly powerful officials’ (Kifner, 2000). Assad biographer Patrick Seale reported Bashar ‘would not deviate from his father’s legacy’ (quoted in Sontag, 2000). Other reports generally indicate that Bashar spent the years prior to his ascension as a highly visible operative within his father’s repressive regime, linking himself to the system and tying his reputation to it (Sachs, 2000a).⁸

Upon inauguration, Bashar al-Assad addressed the nation with mild language regarding internal security. He emphasized gradual modernization and improvements in the economy, but stated that he had ‘no intention of dismantling the one-party system and that freedom of expression should be limited to “positive criticism” of government policies’ (Sachs, 2000b). Bashar al-Assad’s early actions indicate that he felt little need to alleviate whatever uncertainty might have been introduced by the transition. Though many changes in policy followed, the overall impression was of little change. A report from nearly a year later describes ‘more a change in tone than substance. Daily life remains unaltered’ (MacFarquhar, 2001).

The political transition in which Mubarak departed the presidency of Egypt could scarcely have differed more. Though certainly aging, Mubarak was in fine health and expected, by all accounts, at least to finish his current term. The inability of his regime to placate an escalating demonstration of civil disaffection in Tahrir Square led to his unceremonious ousting by the newly formed Supreme Council of the Armed Forces in February of 2011. As head of this body, Field Marshall Tantawi replaced Mubarak as chief executive.

This turnover illustrates the importance of the heir vs. challenger distinction’s second dimension: the irregular turnover introduced considerable uncertainty regarding the regime’s willingness to use force against protesters, despite Tantawi’s role in the preceding administration. Contemporaneous news reports even indicated that protesters on the ground in Tahrir Square and military commanders alike believed it was impossible for Egyptian soldiers to use force against civilians. Anonymous diplomatic sources claimed ‘top army officials had told them that their troops would never use force against civilians’ (Kirkpatrick, 2011).

Just two weeks later, the narrative changed dramatically. Tantawi deployed plainclothes security officers and uniformed soldiers to beat and disperse demonstrators. Soldiers that defected to the protesters’ side were killed (Stack, 2011). The government issued curfews and publicly declared its willingness to use further force to secure order, painting the remaining protesters as ‘anti-revolution’ Mubarak loyalists. Tensions and violence continued in the following weeks, with the army using force, issuing ominous threats, and cracking down on freedom of speech (Mackey, 2011; Blair, 2011).⁹

Research design

We evaluate our hypotheses with a unique measure of repression and fine-grained coding of leader turnovers. We use the de facto leaders identified in Archigos 2.9 (Goemans, Gleditsch & Chiozza, 2009) to create a set of just over 20,000 leader months from 1990 to 2005.¹⁰ Our final dataset includes 148 countries and over 400 individual leaders. The monthly unit of analysis allows us to examine short-run disruptions in repression levels. This data structure prevents an important potential bias. Yearly aggregations of repression levels, as embodied in the CIRI or Political Terror Scale measures, could unfairly attribute coercive actions from a previous leader to an incoming leader. Our measurement scheme incorporates the dates of exit and entry as well as the reported date of events to prevent such misattribution.

Our strategy for measuring repression at this level of analysis builds on the approach of Ritter (2014). As described fully in the Online appendix, we conceptualize repression as a multidimensional phenomenon, featuring threats and warnings, restrictions on movement and freedoms, intimidation, coercion, violent coercion, and full-scale violence. We identify verb forms in the Integrated Data for Events Analysis (IDEA) which reflect these concepts (Bond et al., 2003). For example, eight verbs measure intimidation, including politicized arrests and detentions, abductions, spying, expulsion, and assassination. To differentiate between the events within and across each dimension, we assign each a weight from the Goldstein cooperation/conflict scale as updated for use in the IDEA scheme.¹¹ We then aggregate to the leader month by averaging the scores for all events that fit into the rubric. Our final dependent variable, the monthly change in repression intensity, is a continuous measure ranging from +11 to –11 where more positive scores indicate heightened repression.¹² This interval-level measure allows us to employ OLS regression.

We hypothesize that a clear successor may draw directly on the behavior of his predecessor and should feel less need to establish an independent reputation for toughness. To tap this idea, we need variables that describe the nature of the transition in two dimensions. First, the nature of the turnover itself will speak to levels of uncertainty. Irregular turnovers, those that break with institutionalized rules of succession in some way, introduce greater uncertainty. Second, the entrance of a figure who breaks with the outgoing leader’s political legacy also introduces a greater disruption in information. For both dimensions we utilize Licht’s (2014) Regular Turnover Details dataset.

First, we generate an indicator, Challenger, which taps several types of leaders. Challenger switches on for the tenure of leaders who: enter through irregular means as coded by Archigos; enter as a challenger as coded by Licht (2014); represent the first independent leader of a state, or win the first contested election after a period of caretaker, unity or technocratic governance. Licht (2014) considers leaders who come either from a competing political party in a democratic regime or from an opposition faction in authoritarian regimes to be challengers. We expand this operationalization to include leaders of an entirely new regime, as, for our purposes, the key factor differentiating leaders should be the availability of information about their resolve. Roughly 70% of overall leader months in our sample fit the Challenger description. Next, we code leaders as Heirs if they come from the same political party, family line or faction as their predecessor. A small portion of leaders do not fit into this framework. These are cases where the incoming leader represents a unity, technocratic or caretaker regime, or where the executive rotates (e.g. Sweden). We code these characters as Neutral.¹³

Using these indicators, and leader entry dates, we code a transition indicator which tags the first three months of a leader’s tenure, allowing us to evaluate whether transitions produce a short-term shift in the level of repression.¹⁴ We interact the transition dummy with the types of leadership turnovers to evaluate our hypothesis regarding the differing effect of challenger transitions. Since they are the most numerous, we leave challengers as the reference category.¹⁵

We model the effect of tenure via a quadratic function of cumulative days in office.¹⁶ As we expect that challengers will be less likely to adjust repression levels in the future, we include multiplicative interactions between the components of the quadratic function of tenure and the dummies for leader transition type. This allows us to avoid biasing coefficient estimates if tenure relates differently to repression choices for leaders who can draw on the prior regime’s reputation versus those who must build their own.¹⁷

To address concerns of omitted variable bias, we include a slate of control variables. The most important of these is a measure of the intensity of dissent in prior months. We adopt Ritter’s (2014) variable that codes dissent using IDEA to tag appropriate events, weight by conflict intensity, and aggregate over time. We use both lagged dissent intensity and its lagged change, accounting for dynamics in the effects of disorder on repression levels. This variable is essential to our analysis, because of the tight connection between repression choices and observed challenges. More specifically, though, we include prior round dissent and its trend because of the potential relationship between intense civil disorder and the onset of irregular leader turnover. We seek to avoid conflating a new leader’s reaction to the intense dissent which brought them to power with the process of reputation-building. To further assuage concerns regarding this potential issue, the Online appendix also reports tests which condition the effect of transitions on the level of dissent just prior to a leader taking office.¹⁸

As is traditional in models of repression, we also control for several dimensions of state capacity. We include military size as a proportion of the population from the National Military Capabilities data, v4.0 (Singer, Bremer & Stuckey, 1972). Economic capacity is measured by real GDP, and population size proxies the challenge of controlling citizens (Gleditsch, 2002). Lastly, we incorporate a measure of natural resource rents, because states that do not rely on their populations for revenue may be less constrained in their use of force. We measure this with the annual value of oil and natural gas exports (Ross, 2013). Following Ritter (2014), each of the continuous measures is logarithmically transformed to correct for skew, and we include the one-year lagged change.

To capture alternative political incentives to repress, we include two additional controls. First, the logged days until the next executive election, based on the election dates provided by NELDA (Hyde & Marinov, 2012), tap pressures caused by the threat of turnover. Second, we include the proportional difference in seats held by the executive and the opposition, constructed from the seat share and total capacity variables in the Database of Political Institutions (Beck et al., 2001). This variable taps into the balance of domestic political competition. Finally, we acknowledge that the overall institutional arrangement provides an important context for the level of repression in each country. We include the polity2 index as a general-purpose measure of regime type (Marshall, Gurr & Jaggers, 2013).

Table I.

Regression on change in repression intensity

	(1)	(2)
	All types	Excluding neutral transitions
Transition	0.590** (0.216)	0.590** (0.216)
Heir × transition	–0.222 (0.406)	–0.223 (0.406)
Neutral × transition	–0.297 (0.563)
Tenure in office	–0.037* (0.016)	–0.034* (0.016)
Tenure in office squared	0.001 (0.000)	0.001 (0.000)
Heir × tenure in office	0.026 (0.028)	0.025 (0.028)
Heir × tenure in office squared	–0.001 (0.001)	–0.001 (0.001)
Neutral × tenure in office	0.226 (0.186)
Neutral × tenure in office squared	–0.028 (0.023)
Heir	–0.067 (0.148)	–0.054 (0.148)
Neutral	0.058 (0.189)
Repression intensity _t _–1	–0.552** (0.018)	–0.558** (0.018)
Change in repression intensity _t _–1	–0.205** (0.011)	–0.200** (0.011)
Dissent intensity _t _–1	0.293** (0.012)	0.300** (0.012)
Change in dissent intensity _t _–1	–0.138** (0.010)	–0.142** (0.010)
Military as proportion of population^†	–0.344* (0.159)	–0.318 (0.170)
Real GDP^†	–0.039 (0.248)	–0.142 (0.251)
Population^†	1.197 (2.092)	0.681 (2.109)
Oil and gas exports value^†	–0.017 (0.011)	–0.016 (0.011)
Logged time until next executive election^†	–0.034 (0.027)	–0.030 (0.028)
Polity2^†	–0.018* (0.008)	–0.016 (0.008)
Difference in legislative seats^†	0.034 (0.088)	0.019 (0.089)
Constant	1.271** (0.203)	1.244** (0.205)
Observations	20,910	19,748
Unique leaders	454	416
R²	0.372	0.372
RMSE	2.824	2.809
F	480.0	531.6

**p < 0.01, *p < 0.05. Unit of analysis is the leader month. Robust standard errors, in parentheses, are clustered on leaders. ^†All controls available only annually are lagged by one year to prevent simultaneity bias. Continuous non-proportional variables also logarithmically transformed and differenced.

Results

Table I reports the estimated coefficients from our OLS regression with standard errors clustered on leaders.¹⁹ Model 2 excludes leaders whose relationship to the prior regime could not be characterized as either heir or challenger. A quick evaluation of the coefficients should assuage any concern that inclusion of leaders who enter through neutral processes alters the results in any significant way. Coefficients across the two models are nearly identical, except for some of the controls. Even then, it is only coefficients which were not initially statistically significant that show any substantial movement when the sample is restricted. Hence, in what follows, we will rely on Model 1’s estimates.

The interaction between Transition and the Heir and Neutral indicators means that the constitutive term for Transition tells us the effect of a challenger transition on the change in repression intensity (i.e. when Heir = Neutral = 0). The large, positive, highly significant coefficient for transitions provides strong support for H1. On average, with all else held constant, the months

Figure 1.

Marginal effect of tenure across transition types

following a transition to a new political regime feature heightened repression intensity. This effect, 0.590, is about 17% of a standard deviation, which may seem modest until compared to the effect of variables that previous theories indicate ought to have a very powerful effect. A one-unit increase in the intensity of dissent in the prior round is associated with an increase of roughly half this magnitude. Leaders working under institutions one point more democratic than their peers decrease repression by a tiny fraction of this amount.²⁰ The conditional effects of transitions featuring heirs or neutral figures, in contrast, fail to achieve significance.²¹

An initial investigation of coefficients also suggests strong results for H2. The effect of tenure’s constitutive term is significant and negative, while the interactions with Heir and Neutral are not. To more carefully assess this effect, we calculated the marginal effect of tenure over the course of its range for the three types of leader. Figure 1 depicts the results with 95% confidence bands.²² The middle panel of Figure 1 contains the estimated marginal effect of time in office for leaders who enter as challengers. The significant, negative effect for these leaders indicates that as challengers gain experience, repression intensity decreases. As we would expect, given the existence of other competing strategic processes, this negative effect does not

Figure 2.

Predicted change in repression levels over tenure by type of leader transition

persist throughout a leader’s time in office. Given the distribution of leader tenure, though, the effect remains significant for the bulk of observations.

Clearly, tenure plays no significant role in the repression levels of other types of leaders. This is also as we would expect. The reputation-based incentive to repress early depends both on a lack of information about the new leader and on that leader’s intention to rule for a significant period of time. Neither transitions nor tenure should systematically relate to changes in repression by leaders about whom there is plenty of information (heirs) or those whose tenure is inherently circumscribed by some apolitical rule (neutrals).

As further illustration, we also calculated predicted outcomes across challengers and heirs. Figure 2 provides the average and 95% confidence interval around these predictions. To obtain these quantities of interest we constructed a simulated sampling distribution by drawing 1,000 vectors of $\hat{β}$ from the multivariate Normal distribution defined by Model 1’s parameter matrices. Black spikes and crosses report the effects for challengers; gray spikes and dots, for heirs. Clearly, the average predicted change in repression for an heir to power on the first day in office cannot be statistically distinguished from that on the 365th. The 95% confidence bounds for the first time period encompass those for the second, third, and, indeed, all remaining times. If the leader is a challenger, though, the early days of office feature a substantially higher predicted use of repression. The difference between predicted outcomes on the first day and at the end of the first year is clearly significant at the 95% level. Though the predicted levels after this point appear very similar to each other, recall that the marginal effect of tenure, which continues to drive each average prediction down from year to year, is itself statistically significant. As our theory of the relatively quick equilibration of protest and dissent augurs, after the initial burst of repression, systems with a challenger converge to an expected level of change in repression that includes zero.

Given our interactive modeling strategy, some readers may question our interpretation of the statistically insignificant results for heirs to power. We use a multiplicative interaction in order to directly test the effects of transition and tenure across types of leaders, but this approach also introduces some ambiguity. Do the insignificant results for heirs to power mean that transition and tenure play no role in the level of repression for such leaders? Or do they mean that the effects of these factors for heirs do not significantly differ from those for challengers? To assuage such concerns, we also performed a subsample analysis by type of leader. As we would expect, the results reproduce the findings from the interactive specification: transition and tenure both achieve statistical significance only in the subset of challengers. Neither transition nor time in office exerts significant effects in the sample of heirs to power, who can draw on the prior administration’s reputation without increasing repression (see Table A5 in the Online appendix).

We performed some additional analyses to assess the benefit of our short-term coding of leadership transitions. Annually aggregated information, which is most commonly used in empirical analyses of repression, would require that we identify transitions as occurring over the course of an entire year. To deal with the measurement imprecisions, actually, we would likely need to lag a measure of transition, requiring our analysis to assume that 12 months later the effects of transitions still drive heightened repression. We believe our more fine-grained data structure provides a significant benefit by alleviating this problem. To demonstrate this benefit, we estimated the model across increasingly long specifications of transition, leaving the variable ‘on’ for three, four, and eventually 24 months. Figure 3 illustrates the rapid decline in magnitude of the estimated effect of transitions as their time-frame is increased.²³

Figure 3.

Estimated effect of challenger transitions across alternative time frames

Conclusion

A straightforward contention motivates this article: uncertainty and repeated interactions incentivize new leaders to repress their citizens, unless they can draw on the previous regime’s reputation. Our empirical analysis supports this central proposition. Challenger transitions feature heightened levels of repressive force, with use of the state’s coercive power lessening over time. This finding meshes well with what we know about reputation-building and contributes to our understanding of the conditions under which states abuse civilians’ human rights.

Our contribution stems, primarily, from separating the executive from ‘the state’. Repression is not a game between faceless states and amorphous mobs. Presidents, prime ministers, supreme rulers – these men and women are known entities with personalities and reputations of their own. Because of this individuality, leader turnover sometimes introduces uncertainty regarding the willingness of the state to turn the weapons of war against civilians.

Importantly, we acknowledge that some new leaders introduce more uncertainty than others. Heirs to power can trade on their predecessors’ actions. This does not mean repression will lessen, or that these leaders will not lash out if challenged. Instead, it means their reasons for repression differ. If heirs choose to heighten coercion domestically, it is not because the opposition may be harboring hopes that the new executive differs in resolve from the previous regime. The variation in uncertainty about new leaders should also matter in other realms where reputations have been studied, particularly international crisis bargaining. Incorporating the difference between heirs and challengers may address remaining inefficiencies in empirical models and allow for new explanations of international phenomena.

Our framework sheds light on one of the players in the game. The dissent side, that amorphous mob, is more difficult to distinguish with current large-N data. We concur with calls in the field to actively consider the tight relationship between repression and dissent when designing empirical research (Ritter & Conrad, 2016). Future theoretical and empirical work would benefit from attention to whether and how the nature of opposition might change the reputational logic. Does the civilian opposition speak with a single, unified voice? Is it a wild popular movement, or an organized political entity? Can it rely on international support from powerful states, or a regional diaspora? Future research will focus on developing sharp theoretical expectations regarding how the nature of opposition movements may affect the types of repressive options utilized by new leaders.

Finally, this article examines only one of the choices available to new leaders, but in truth they select a package of policies to deal with the threat of dissent and instability. Reputation-building may also exist in the softer tools of power. Future work will integrate the concessionary actions of new leaders, as well. We believe it is likely that both tacks may be taken at the same time, though perhaps aimed at different segments of the population. This endeavor would benefit from a finer-grained operationalization of the target of state actions.

Footnotes

Replication data

The Online appendix, dataset, codebook, and do-files for the empirical analysis in this article, using Stata version 13 or higher, can be found at .

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the IR workshop at the University of Mississippi, World Politics Workshop at Binghamton, Emily Ritter, Jeff Carter, Dave Clark, Ben Fordham, Bill Reed, Jessica Maves Braithwaite, Scott Wolford, Cathy Wu, Jessica Chen Weiss, Michael McKoy, Alexander Downes, and Lindsey O’Rourke.

Notes

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