Political Effects of State-Led Repression

This chapter provides empirical evidence of the long-run impact of state repression on the political preferences and participation of the repressed. María Angélica Bautista develops a theoretical framework to generate hypotheses about the impact of repression and collects a unique dataset in Chile, where she surveyed subjects who experienced repression, and builds a matched control group. She finds two main sets of robust results consistent with the theory. First, repressed people do not differentially change their political ideology on a left-right scale. Repression leads people to neither conform to the ideology of the dictatorship nor induce a “backlash.” Second, repression leads to political demobilization. In particular, repression leads to a lower probability of membership of the repressed in political parties relative to the non-repressed, even after the dictatorship has left power.