The Impact of State Repression on Political Behavior amid Social Unrest

• In Event: Protest Dynamics and Social Change

Abstract

How and when does exposure to severe state repression influence political behavior? The impact of state repression on political behavior remains an open question with mixed findings in existing research. A significant challenge in much of this literature is isolating the causal effects of exposure to repression. Repression activity is not randomly distributed, and communities experiencing repression often have systematic differences. Moreover, most studies examine either repression or protest activity, though both frequently occur simultaneously in democratic contexts. Additionally, the bulk of existing research focuses on flawed democracies or competitive autocracies. In strong democracies, severe repression episodes are exceedingly rare. Furthermore, as most studies examining electoral outcomes rely on aggregate voting data, little is understood about the potential mechanisms linking repression exposure to political behavior. Thus, the question of whether exposure to severe state repression affects turnout in democracies, and through what mechanisms, remains largely unanswered.
This study aims to bridge these gaps by investigating how exposure to state repression during Chile's 2019 Social Outburst influenced voter turnout in the 2021 Constitutional Assembly Elections - the nearest competitive election following the unrest. We employ a Difference-in-Differences (Diff-in-Diff) approach using individual panel data, integrating municipal and individual-level data from various sources. At the individual level, we utilize retrospective turnout and political trust data from the ELSOC panel. For the municipal level, we measure repression activity using data from a registry of state violence episodes from the National Institute of Human Rights (INDH) and protest activity with the COES protest events dataset. After merging individual with municipal data, we empirically assess whether repression activity at the municipal level influenced voter turnout and by which mechanisms.
Our findings indicate that exposure to severe state repression leads to lower voter turnout among citizens who had high levels of political trust prior to the social outburst. We find that exposure to severe repression contributes significantly to the overall marginal decline in turnout observed in the ELSOC sample during the study period. Additionally, a placebo test reveals no significant effects on turnout behavior before the social uprising, thereby lending credence to our identification assumption. Finally, we find evidence suggesting that political trust could be one key mechanism in explaining lower turnout among individuals with high political trust who were closely exposed to severe repression. In particular, we find that exposure to severe repression strongly reduces political trust - trust in the Presidency, Congress, and the Judiciary - among the aforementioned subset of individuals.
These results underscore the profound impact that severe state repression can have in diminishing political trust and reducing turnout. In a democracy like Chile, citizens who are closely exposed to severe repression, are likely to perceive such repression as indicative of democratic failure - the use of authoritarian means by political elites and a violation of democratic norms. Consequently, citizens who previously had a high trust in the political system may reassess their trust in political institutions after close exposure to severe repression. In turn, this "reversal of political trust" diminishes their likelihood of participating in elections. The study highlights the crucial role of political trust in democratic participation and the potential for state repression to erode faith in democratic institutions. Therefore, a key takeaway is that severe repression poses not only a threat to fundamental human rights but can also be a source of democratic erosion.

Authors

• Ignacio Urbina, Stony Brook University

• Sebastian Rivera