ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a description of bi-variate patterns to multivariate analysis of the Domestic Democratic Peace proposition. It reiterates that the pacifying effect of democracy heralded in the literature is substantively small and frequently not robust to changes in modeling specifications. Additionally, these pacifying effects tend to be highly conditional and non-linear. The chapter argues that the societal conflict alone explains physical integrity rights violations in democratic societies. It replicates the so-called standard repression model using the political terror scales, the Cingranelli and Richards' Human Rights Project Data, and Ill-Treatment and Torture Project Data measures. Repression in short can be seen as a specific type or category of physical integrity rights violations – namely, the subset of violations that are perpetrated with explicit political aims. The standard repression model fits best for measures of these politically motivated violations (i.e., political imprisonment) and democracies are statistically and substantively less likely to engage in them.
