Although scholarly consensus suggests that dissent causes repression, the behaviors are endogenous: governments and dissidents act in expectation of each other’s behavior. Empirical studies have not accounted well for this endogeneity. We argue that preventive aspects of repression meaningfully affect the relationship between observed dissent and repression. When governments use preventive repression, the best response to dissent that does occur is unclear; observed dissent does not meaningfully predict responsive repression. By contrast, governments that do not engage in ex ante repression will be more likely to do it ex post. We follow U.S. voting scholarship and propose a new instrument to model the endogeneity: rainfall. We couple rainfall data in African provinces and U.S. states with data on dissent and repression and find that dissent fails to have a significant effect on responsive repression in states that engage in preventive repression.

States whose agents engage in torture in a given year have a 93% chance of continuing to torture in the following year. What leads governments to stop the use of torture? We focus on the principal-agent relationship between the executive and the individuals responsible for supervising and interrogating state prisoners. We argue that some liberal democratic institutions change the probability that leaders support the creation of institutions that discourage jailers and interrogators from engaging in torture, thus increasing the probability of a state terminating its use of torture. These relationships are strongly conditioned by the presence of violent dissent; states rarely terminate the use of torture when they face a threat. Once campaigns of violent dissent stop, however, states with popular suffrage and a free press are considerably more likely to terminate their use of torture. Also given the end of violent dissent, the greater the number of veto points in government, the lower the likelihood that a state terminates its use of torture.

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The Ill‐Treatment and Torture (ITT) Data Collection Project uses content analysis to measure allegations of government ill‐treatment and torture made by Amnesty International (AI) from 1995 to 2005. ITT's country‐year (CY) data quantify AI allegations of ill‐treatment and torture at the country‐year unit of observation and further across different responsible government agents and across different econo‐socio‐political groups of alleged victims. This paper introduces the Ill‐Treatment and Torture country‐year data, describes quantitative patterns likely to be of interest to researchers focused on the study of international non‐governmental organizations (INGOs) and human rights, and suggests a number of theoretically motivated questions that can be explored using the ITT country‐year data.

Do domestic institutions affect how dictators respond to their political opposition? In this paper, I argue that institutionalization is key to understanding whether dictators respond to domestic opposition groups with concessions. I present a nominal typology of dictatorial opposition movements, arguing that the manner in which the opposition is incorporated into the regime reveals important information about the types of concessions dictators will likely provide. Using a system of endogenous equations, I show that dictators buy off some types of domestic opposition with material concessions and liberalize when they face other types of opposition. Because dictators often make decisions facing environmental constraints, however, I also argue that financial conditions can limit a dictator's ability to respond beneficently to the opposition. Do domestic institutions affect how dictators respond to their political opposition? Recent developments in international relations suggest that domestic institutions have an appreciable effect on repression in dictatorships (Vreeland 2008;