How do authoritarian governments respond to the threat of opposition protest after disputed election results? The literature on state repression has long shown that governments use coercion to suppress protests that threaten the political status quo. It remains unclear, however, whether governments seek to maximize the impact of repression by imposing sanctions indiscriminately, stoking general terror to induce acquiescence, or by targeting sanctions against those most likely to challenge the government. This paper contributes to the study of electoral authoritarian regimes by examining how the Ethiopian government responded to opposition protests that erupted in the national capital after disputed election results in 2005. Based on an analysis of nearly 15,000 protest-related arrest records, the paper shows that the Ethiopian government sought to suppress protest through a strategy of geographic targeting, detaining young men mainly residing near the executive office. Distance from the executive office alone can explain nearly a third of the variation in neighborhood arrest rates, while factors such as the intensity of protest, the location of opposition leader arrests, and the location of police stations are found to have no impact on neighborhood arrest rates.
