Explaining the Severity of Violations of Human Rights.

The growing literature on abuses of human rights seldom considers what specific socioeconomic or cultural conditions best explains severity in the abuse of human rights by governments. Do particular cultural factors such as growth in ethnic and religious polarization ‘cause’ governments on average to respond with greater repressive intensity compared to say changes in other social and/or political conditions such as population density or onsets of international war? If so, what are the precise comparative risk factorsâ€" from low to high intensity repressionâ€" that governments are likely to impose based on the well-known six-point ordinal Political Terror Scales? Likewise, if other structural factors such economic success and being democratic mitigates propensities of governments to repress as has been found in the literature, what are the comparative risk factors that they decrease severity of repression? Using replication data from Fearon and Laitin (APSR 2003), I examine these questions using an order logit approach across 180 countries, across the years 1976 to 1999. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]