This crossnational study seeks to explain variations in governmental repression of human rights to personal integrity (state terrorism) in a 153-country sample during the eighties. We outline theoretical perspectives on this topic and subject them to empirical tests using a technique appropriate for our pooled cross-sectional time-series design, namely, ordinary least squares with robust standard errors and a lagged dependent variable. We find democracy and participation in civil or international war to have substantively important and statistically significant effects on repression. The effects of economic development and population size are more modest. The hypothesis linking leftist regime types to abuse of personal integrity rights receives some support. We find no reliable evidence that population growth, British cultural influence, military control, or economic growth affect levels of repression. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for scholars and practitioners concerned with the prevention of personal integrity abuse.

Following both Pritchett and Gibson, we thought we were, in “Authoritarianism and the Functions of Courts” (Tate & Haynie 1993), extolling the virtues of an infrequently grown, but potentially beautiful or even useful, floral species: falsifiable, reproducible research on the role of courts outside the United States of America. Indeed, because our bloom grew outside the well-cultivated plots of the industrialized democracies, we thought it might be of still greater interest to the horticultural community of sociolegal studies. Thus we urged the members of that community to try their own hands at growing this rare blossom.

Focusing on the independent and powerful pre–martial law Philippine Supreme Court, we investigate the impact of the establishment and breakdown of authoritarianism on the court's performance of the functions of conflict resolution, social control, and administration. We develop hypotheses concerning and models of the impacts of the onset, consolidation, and breakdown of martial law authoritarianism under Ferdinand Marcos on that court's handling of the three functions. Using Box-Jenkins time series analysis methods, we assess the impacts of the onset, consolidation, and breakdown of Marcos's authoritarianism on the Supreme Court's functional performance. In our analysis, authoritarianism had no impact on the Court's performance of the conflict resolution function; authoritarianism's onset increased and its breakdown decreased the Court's performance of the routine administrative function; and authoritarianism's onset decreased but its consolidation increased the Court's performance of the social control function.

Theory-based personal attributes models of the civil rights and liberties and economics decision making of the Canadian Supreme Court justices serving from 1949–1985 are developed from Lipset and Rokkan's (1967) approach to explaining mass political behavior. The models show both behaviors to be influenced by Quebec/non-Quebec regional origins and religious affiliation, political party, being appointed by the last laissez faire Liberal Prime Minister, King, and having judicial and political experience. The models are reasonably potent, statistically. Their most important attributes capture crucial dimensions in contemporary Canadian politics, region, and party, and also have implications for the cross-national study of judicial behavior.

The prevailing view among students of judicial politics is that judges' background characteristics or personal attributes cannot provide satisfactory explanations for variation in their decision-making behavior. Parsimonious attribute models reported here account for 70 to 90 percent of the variance in the voting of postwar Supreme Court justices in split decisions concerning civil rights and liberties, and economics. Seven variables representing six meaningful and easily interpretable concepts achieve this success. The concepts are Judge's Party Identification, Appointing President, Prestige of Prelaw Education (economics only), Appointed from Elective Office, Appointment Region (civil liberties only), Extensiveness of Judicial Experience, and Type of Prosecutorial Experience. The impressive performance of these models is attributed to superior measurement, operationalization, and model building; to a greater similarity between personal attribute models and more fully specified ones than has been assumed; and to the possibility that the attitudes which intervene between the personal attributes and the voting of judges are causally very closely linked to voting.

This note reports the results of an initial exploration into the significance of the social environments (“contexts”) in which people live in the shaping of their individual political behavior. Many scholars have argued that social scientists should pay more serious attention to contextual variables when they go about constructing social theories. But there have been few systematic efforts to demonstrate empirically the overall importance of contextual variables as predictors of individual behaviors, especially relative to the importance of personal (“individual”) predictors. Here the relative potency of two sets of predictors—one individual and one contextual—is investigated for a sample of British voters by means of a well-known multivariate search strategy, “tree analysis.” The results suggest that contextual variables have little to add to explanations of voting behavior based on individual variables—at least for these data.