UC Merced

How do governments contend with multiple sources of dissent? The Law of Coercive Responsiveness tells us that governments respond to threats to the status quo with repression, but this does not explain how governments choose to spend their limited resources when there are multiple targets. To answer this question, I extend our understanding of “dissident threat.” In addition to the two latent dimensions of Group Demand and Group Capability that the literature has identified, we also need to consider the larger universe of threats, the threat environment, when assessing the government’s repressive responses. Using a game-theoretic model, I demonstrate how the government’s repressive decisions are a function of the threat posed by the targeted group and the threat posed by the other groups around it. I then use the MAROB dataset to demonstrate this relationship empirically, showing that the threat posed by other groups has a significant influence on the government’s allocation of repression. In particular, I demonstrate that increasing the number of capable groups around a targeted group decreases the repression that targeted group will face. These results show that governments have a hierarchy of threat, prioritizing capable targets in an attempt to thwart immediate threats over ones that may become a problem in the future.