THE WEIGHT OF THE PAST - EXPLORING LAGGED DETERMINANTS OF POLITICAL REPRESSION

The present article investigates contemporaneous and lagged effects of democracy, coercive capacity, and political conflict on repressive be havior. As designed, 51 countries from 1948 to 1982 are examined with an Almon distributed lag model on yearly data (N = 1820). From the emp irical investigation, both short- and long-term relationships are foun d to be significantly related to the rate at which censorship and poli tical restrictions are applied. Past values of democracy are found to affect repression negatively for five years and past values of disside nt behavior are found to affect repression positively for seven years. I conclude that a relatively complex memory structure, encompassing b oth short- and long-term explanations, must be employed when one attem pts to understand why stales use repressive behavior.