On a documentary level the world seems to have converged upon a set of ideals regarding states’ human rights behavior and the appropriate institutions to promote and protect those ideals. At the turn of the new century the global script for state legitimacy calls for a written constitution or the equivalent, with an embedded bill of rights, democratic processes and institutions, and, increasingly, a judicial check on state power to protect an internationally recognized set of human rights. Evidence of formal acceptance of these norms is overwhelming. The formal commitment to international human rights norms approaches near universality as each...

While most of the current empirical work on political repression has approached states’ behavior from the perspective of international relations theory (primarily a “soft” rational-choice perspective), I seek to expand the theoretical underpinnings of a broader set of subfields in political science, including public law and comparative politics. As I noted in Chapter 1, I do not aim to offer an overarching grand theory that synthesizes the theoretical concerns of these subfields; however, I argue that these theories express commonalities that I incorporate under Most and Starr’s (1989) organizing concepts of opportunity and willingness. I believe these concepts are useful...

The long list above presents a very few examples of countless acts of political repression occurring throughout the world every year despite a near-universal commitment among nation-states not to engage in these behaviors. Social scientists committed to the study of human rights or contentious state politics have produced a substantive and growing body of empirical research that seeks to identify the factors that motivate these actors to engage in repression, and what circumstances enhance or constrain their opportunity and their willingness to utilize coercive tools against their own citizens. In this chapter I address the “standard model” that has developed...

Increasing attention is given to the concept of judicial independence by international lawyers, academics, and aid organizations interested in the rule of law, democratization, and/or states’ human rights behavior. This association between an independent judiciary and rights protection is not a new one. Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America noted that an independent judiciary empowered with judicial review is “one of the most powerful barriers erected against the tyranny of political assemblies” (1966, 261). The current focus on judicial independence and rights protection has largely stemmed from the renewed emphasis on constitutionalism in the democratizing world of the...

As noted throughout this book, a global script for state legitimacy appears to have emerged, one that calls for a written constitution or the equivalent, with an embedded bill of rights, democratic processes and institutions, and, increasingly, some form of judicial review or restraint on state power to protect political and human rights. Much of the constitution writing in the last half of the twentieth century resulted from the transition of almost 100 former colonies to independence, and, as Go (2003) notes, most of these states have rewritten their original postcolonial constitutions at least once. These documents accounted for roughly...

In this chapter I examine the role that domestic threats to a state play in the government’s choice to employ tools of repression, especially when the threats involve violence. As Finn (1991) notes, political violence merits special attention, not just because it is “among the most frequent and severe of constitutional emergencies, but because it is best suited to exposing the limitations of constitutionalism” (6). As the three excerpts above illustrate, constitutional promises of human rights protection are most at risk of abuse during these periods, when a regime may respond in disproportionate measure, ignore constitutional rights, and use the...

Numerous scholars and legal commentators have posited that the world society of states has converged upon a set of ideals regarding human rights behavior and the appropriate institutions to promote and protect those ideals. These ideals include a written constitution or the equivalent, an entrenched bill of rights, and democratic processes and institutions, which increasingly include a judicial check on state power to protect an internationally recognized set of human rights. In this book I have presented clear evidence of substantial formal acceptance of the human rights norms in constitutional documents, as well as acceptance of the international norms for...