Rocks, Bottles, and Weak Autocracies: The Role of Political Regime Settings on Contention-Repression Interactions

Scholars have recently begun to explore more nuanced ways of looking at the links between protest and repression, including consideration of the regime and other structural impacts on this dynamic relationship. This work contributes to this growing literature by employing Cox proportional hazards models to analyze daily data from 98 countries to study the exchanges between violent and nonviolent contention and repression under different regime settings. Results highlight the importance of considering the political setting when examining the dynamic contention-repression interaction, the need to account for both contentious actions' effects on state repression and state repression's effects on contention, and the fact that regime type categories should be further disaggregated in order to fully capture the particularities of this complex relationship.