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. 2023 Jun 14;10(6):221227.
doi: 10.1098/rsos.221227. eCollection 2023 Jun.

Political repression motivates anti-government violence

Henrikas Bartusevičius  1   2 , Florian van Leeuwen  3 , Michael Bang Petersen  2
Affiliations

Political repression motivates anti-government violence

Henrikas Bartusevičius et al. R Soc Open Sci. .

Abstract

We examined whether political repression deters citizens from engaging in anti-government behaviour (its intended goal) or in fact motivates it. Analyses of 101 nationally representative samples from three continents (N = 139 266) revealed a positive association between perceived levels of repression and intentions to engage in anti-government violence. Additional analyses of fine-grained data from three countries characterized by widespread repression and anti-government violence (N = 2960) identified a positive association between personal experience with repression and intentions to engage in anti-government violence. Randomized experiments revealed that thoughts about repression also motivate participation in anti-government violence. These results suggest that political repression, aside from being normatively abhorrent, motivates anti-repressor violence.

Keywords: aggression; anti-government protest; collective action; human rights; political violence; repression.

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Conflict of interest statement

Authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Countries, with survey years and sample sizes in parentheses, included in the multinational analyses. Colour-coding represents The Political Terror Scale (2018 scores) [35].
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Political repression of Belarusians, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Predicted values and probabilities (with 95% CIs) of radicalism intentions (radicalism intention scale, RIS), intentions to participate in political violence, and self-reported participation in political violence as a function of repression scales, RS. Predictors and outcomes are 0–1 normalized.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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