Student's Bio
Jessie Wu is a senior majoring in political and medicine, health, & society. Together with Dr. Emily Ritter, they worked on studying how bureaucratic repression can occur. Dr. Ritter and I argue that democratic leaders are more likely to turn to indirect, or bureaucratic, repression when dominant groups are more likely to benefit from marginalizing minority groups through violence. When dominant groups benefit from marginalizing others, they reward authorities that allow the marginalization with reliable support. If civilians are an unrecognized tool in a political arsenal, scholars are missing instances of repression observed within their political studies, the scholarly implications are that we currently have too narrow a definition of repression in political science. Hence, these implications of private repression provoke new discussions on the legitimacy and credibility of democracies.