In the last chapter, I examined the influence of diverse aspects of institutional democracy on state repression. This included mass-oriented characteristics such as suffrage and competition weighted by participation referred to as Voice, as well as elite-oriented characteristics such as the number of official and unofficial political actors that wield an influence on central authorities referred to as Veto. Results disclose that repressive behavior is generally decreased in lethality when these aspects of the political system are enhanced. As suggested earlier, however, it might be more appropriate to evaluate the effect of democracy on repressive behavior as conditioned by different forms of political conflict (both intrastate and interstate). Indeed, this may be the strongest test of the domestic democratic peace. If, despite the presence of behavioral threats, Voice and Veto can still reduce the lethality of repression, this speaks to the power of the relationship. If, in the face of conflict behavior, however, Voice and Veto cannot reduce repressive behavior, then this identifies an important limitation of the peace proposition. In an effort to understand the democracy-repression nexus, I now reexamine the models discussed in Chapter 4 and introduce different interactions between democracy and political conflict.

Measures of voice

I begin my reassessment of the peace proposition with an examination of Suffrage and Competition/Participation. Specifically, I evaluate three models where the particular aspect of democracy under consideration is interacted with three measures of political conflict: violent political dissent, civil war, and interstate war.