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The Psychology of State Repression: Fear and DissentDecisions in Zimbabwe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 November 2018

LAUREN E. YOUNG Open the ORCID record for LAUREN E. YOUNG [Opens in a new window]
LAUREN E. YOUNG*
Affiliation:
University of California, Davis
*
*Lauren E. Young, Assistant Professor,Department of Political Science, University of California, Davis,leyou@ucdavis.edu, www.laurenelyssayoung.com.
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Abstract

Many authoritarian regimes use frightening acts of repression tosuppress dissent. Theory from psychology suggests that emotionsshould affect how citizens perceive and process information aboutrepression risk and ultimately whether or not they dissent. I testthe effects of emotions on dissent in autocracy by running alab-in-the-field experiment with 671 opposition supporters inZimbabwe that randomly assigns some participants to an exercise thatinduces a mild state of fear, whereas others complete a neutralplacebo. The fear treatment significantly reduces hypothetical andbehavioral measures of dissent by substantively large amounts. Italso increases pessimism about parameters that enter into thedissent decision as well as risk aversion. These results show thatemotions interact in important ways with strategic considerations.Fear may be a powerful component of how unpopular autocrats excludelarge portions of their populations from mobilizing for regimechange.

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Research Article
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American Political Science Review , Volume 113 , Issue 1 , February 2019 , pp. 140 - 155
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2018 

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Footnotes

My thanks to the data collection team at Voice for Democracy.Thanks to Abhit Bhandari, Graeme Blair, Christopher Blattman,Alexander Coppock, Macartan Humphreys, Albert Fang, GrantGordon, Donald Green, Kimuli Kasara, Dacher Keltner, AdrienneLeBas, Andrew Little, Isabela Mares, John Marshall, EldredMasunungure, Gwyneth McClendon, Tamar Mitts, Suresh Naidu,Gabriella Sacramone-Lutz, Camille Strauss-Kahn, Thomas Zeitzoff,and seminar participants at CAPERS, WGAPE, NEWEPS, the YaleInstitute for Social and Political Studies, APSA, and theColumbia Comparative Politics Seminar for feedback at variousstages. Thanks to the US Institute for Peace; the InternationalPeace Research Association Foundation; the Earth InstituteAdvanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity;the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences;the Columbia University Department of Political Science; and theNational Science Foundation for support for this research. Thisexperiment was pre-registered with EGAP and can be accessed athttp://egap.org/registration/1353.This research was approved by the Columbia UniversityInstitutional Review Board under protocol IRB-AAAP2200.Replication files are available at the American PoliticalScience Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/OOMI57.

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