Repressive Coverage In An Authoritarian Context: Threat, Weakness and Legitimacy In South Korea's Democracy Movement

While most studies on the repression-mobilization relationship have focused on the impact of the former on the latter, recent work has shown that characteristics of protest can influence state repression strategies. This article corroborates recent work on the repression of social movements and shows that both weak and threatening attributes of protest events contribute to the “repressive coverage” – the likelihood and severity of repression – of social movements in an authoritarian context. In addition, results from logistic regressions show that authoritarian states not only respond to weak status actors and situational threats but act strategically to repress social movements that challenge their political legitimacy. This article extends the scope of the repression-mobilization literature by differentiating the role of threat in eliciting repression in a non-Western democratic setting and showing the strategic dimension to the repressive behavior of authoritarian states.