CINTA ADHESIVA HIPOALERGENICA

The variable length registers the amount of days the hunger strike have lasted. Given that hunger strikes can consists of more than one participants, and that participants may join in at different times, this variable is not a measure of how “lethal” the hunger strike becomes, but a measure of how long the protest event have lasted. As discussed in Section 2.1.1, some hunger strikers may also decide to take limited nourishment on the side, which may prolong the hunger strikes for years. As a result, the dataset shows a few hunger strikes lasting as much as 1000 days. There are very few cases where hunger strikers state publicly that they take limited nourishment. This way of “cheating” may potentially happen in greater numbers than we know, but it is anyway a factor that is difficult to control for. These long lasting hunger strikes are therefore included in the analysis. In post-estimation, inspection of the residuals will reveal whether or not extreme hunger strike lengths drive the results.

The duration of a hunger strike can be a contested subject. In many cases hunger strikers and authorities gives different estimates. When the dataset consists of several durations I have used the most conservative number. A challenge with measuring the length of hunger strikes is that this is sometimes disputed by the different actors. Because of this, the dataset includes two variables measuring both the most minimum and maximum estimates of

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the length. But the variations between these variables are so small that I choose to go for the minimum estimates variables without any more considerations.

Size

The variable size measures the number of hunger strikers participating in the same hunger strike. Because participants of a hunger strike can join or quit during the strike, the number of participants differs at the beginning and at the end. In 82 cases, the number of hunger strikers has either increased or decreased during the strike, whereby the largest discrepancy is 8000. The dataset therefore includes three different measures of hunger strike size: (1) the size at the start of the hunger strike, (2) the size at the end of the hunger strike, and (3) the maximum estimate if sources are unclear. Most observations only have reported size in the first category. If the hunger strike is reported to have increased or decreased during the strike, category two is reported. When the size of the hunger strike is disputed, category 1 takes minimum, estimate, while category 3 takes the maximum estimate.

Because the outcome of the hunger strike is decided at the end of the hunger strike, it makes most sense to use the end-size as the main variable. But because the variation is big, I will also test the two other variables at a later stage in the analysis.

Multiple location

The dummy-variable Multiple locations indicates whether the hunger strike have taken place at more than one location, being different cities, universities, and so on. This variable measure indicate whether the hunger strike has extended support, but a weakness in this variable is that missing values has been recoded as “no” in order to have enough valid observations. For most observations, no information in the media regarding multiple locations would strongly

indicate that it only took place at one location, but this can also be problematic. Hunger strike motivation

As already fully described in Section 2.5, the hunger strikes are categorized into ten

categories of political motivation according to political fields. This is the closest we come to a measure of the hunger strikers’ demands, which should to a certain extent be captures by these variables. As not all categories can be measured in the regression analysis, I’ve decided to choose two categories that can test the effect of two contrasting motivations.

In Table 2.4, eight of the ten categories (all except “other issues” and “unclear”) are cross-correlated with various variables, including the four hunger strike outcomes. The types of motivation that have the highest correlations are “Peace, war and conflict”, “social

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educational concerns”. Out of these, I find “Peace, war and conflict” and “Immigration and asylum” to be two quite contrasting categories. As mentioned in Section 2.5, hunger strikers within the “peace, war and conflict” category are striking for others than themselves (antiwar, nuclear issues), while the “immigration and asylum” are motivated by their own situation as refugees and asylum seekers. Therefore, these two variables will be tested in the analysis. Hunger strike frequency

The continuous variable hunger strike frequency measures the amount of previous hunger strikes a country has experienced. This variable is intended to measure the experience of hunger strikes, because it is assumed that countries are able to learn from this experience (see Section 2.4.2).

Control variables

As mentioned in Section 3.2.1, I will apply a dummy variable indicating whether observations are from the United States in order to control the effect of the large amount of observations from one country.

Country data 3.2.4

Level of democracy

Level of democracy will be measured by the variable Polity2 from the dataset The Polity IV Project: Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800-2012 (Marshall and Gurr, 2012). The variable is a scale ranging from -10 being the least democratic to 10 being the most democratic. There are many measures of democracy, which all have their strengths and weaknesses. One favorable property of the Polity2 variable is that it is a scale, which allows for a more substantial interpretation than with a dummy variable. Another is that they, in contrast to Freedom House, are completely open about their indicator scores.

The Polity2 variable is made out of several criteria, where their main focus is on formal institutional. Their five criteria are the following: competitiveness of executive recruitment, openness of executive recruitment, constraints on the chief executive,

competitiveness of political participation and regulation of participation. The two last criteria appears most relevant for my purpose. Competitiveness of political participation refers to: “the extent to which alternative preferences for policy and leadership can be pursued in the political arena”. While regulation of participation refers to “the extent that there are binding rules on when, whether, and how political preferences are expressed.” These elements are in accordance with the initial intention of having this variable in the analysis, as discussed in Section 2.4.2, namely to see whether states that are open to participation and thus protest

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(political input structures), also are environments where hunger strikes are more likely to gain concessions. The Polity2 variable has been criticized for the lack of civil liberties (Knutsen, 2011: 91) but for my purposes in this thesis, that will not be a problem.

Coalition government

Coalition government will be measured by a dummy variable from the Democracy and Development Extended Data Set, an extension of the ACLP dataset (Cheibub et al., 2005). The dataset stretches from 1946 up to today.

The statistical model