The Determinants Of Civic Space Crackdowns :Evidence From Human Rights Reports

This thesis examines the effect of threat perception on protest repression by focusingon protest and repression dynamics in Turkey during democratic backsliding.Questioning when and against whom protest repression is more intense, it seeksto understand the determinants of state response to dissent. However, traditionalmedia sourcing and news outlets’ coverage are insufficient in non-democratic settingswhere the media is co-opted, censored, and heavily repressed, which requiresaddressing additional causes of selection bias. To address this problem, I constructand leverage a unique dataset based on human rights reports. The TRACE datasetmeasures protest and repression events in Turkey since 2013 with fine-grained eventcategorization and issue type identification. The comparison with other protestevent datasets illustrates TRACE’s strength in measuring protest repression acrossdifferent issues in Turkey. To analyze changes in protest repression behavior acrossvarious issue types, I employ multinomial logistic regression. Results show that theintensity of protest repression increases with the perceived threat. Further, mobilizationbecomes more threatening to the regime when it is challenged by laborand environmental issues. Ultimately, this thesis aims to provide more insight intotargeted protest repression and threat perceptions in non-democratic regimes.