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Where Is the Tipping Point? Bilateral Trade and the Diffusion of Human Rights
Abstract
Drawing on a panel of 136 countries over the period 1982–2004, we study a tipping point version of Vogel's ‘California Effect’ in the context of the diffusion of human rights practices. Because human rights practices are often deeply embedded in a society's customs and political institutions, we expect that a high level of pressure from the importing countries is needed to bring about changes in an exporting country's human rights records. We find strong empirical support for this threshold effect; provided that the average level of respect for human rights in importing countries is sufficiently high, trading relationships can operate as transmission belts for the diffusion of human rights practices from importing to exporting countries.
... Hafner-Burton, 2005a;Tsutsui & Hafner-Burton, 2005). Economic globalization may improve human rights outcomes in developing countries if suppliers or policymakers in those countries are pressed by trade or investment partners to protect human rights (Cao, Greenhill, & Prakash, 2013). Conversely, economic globalization may create competitive pressures that generate human rights abuses (McCorquodale & Fairbrother, 1999). ...
... Quantitative studies focusing on trade in the aggregate find that trade generates human rights betterment (Apodaca, 2001;Harrelson-Stephens & Callaway, 2003). However, more nuanced work looking at trade relationships in dyadic terms suggests that trade-based pressures come primarily from countries in which human rights issues are highly salient (Cao et al., 2013). The implication is that the nature of the relationship between trade and human rights in developing countries is contingent on the partners that a given developing country is trading with. ...
... Earlier studies suggest likely relationships between each of these controls and physical integrity rights. Trade has been found to improve human rights (Apodaca, 2001;Harrelson-Stephens & Callaway, 2003), although this likely requires great pressure from traders that promote human rights (Cao et al., 2013). 18 Research indicates that FDI reduces human rights violations in developing countries (Richards, Gelleny, & Sacko, 2001;Kim & Trumbore, 2010). ...
China’s rise has been met with concern by human rights scholars and activists. Critics contend that China is using its clout to weaken the international human rights regime while simultaneously empowering abusive governments in the developing world. Against this backdrop, this study investigates whether China’s growing economic dominance has contributed to physical integrity rights violations in developing countries. Specifically, I theorize that China shields its major trade partners from international scrutiny, thereby weakening the external constraints that would otherwise prevent leaders from abusing human rights. Removing international-level constraints elevates the importance of domestic-level factors, such that whether China’s partners do or do not repress physical integrity rights is contingent on domestic political institutions. Veto players are of particular importance because they can constrain leaders that have been otherwise empowered through trade with China. Within this context, I hypothesize that the number of veto players in a given country determines whether trading intensively with China leads to more violations of physical integrity rights. Through analysis of country-level panel data, I find evidence that trading with China worsens physical integrity rights abuses in developing countries. However, this effect is weaker where veto players are more numerous.
... There are a number of challenges associated with identifying a third-party reputation effect of sanctions, not least of which is isolating the domain of relevance that states consider when witnessing third party sanctions and deciding on their own policy. To isolate a relevant domain in which sanctions could have a wider reputation effect, I focus specifically on human rights sanctions issued by the United States. 1 I examine the issue of human rights because previous research highlights the strategic behavior inherent in these practices, and demonstrates that desire for economic ties with large markets like the US can (but does not always) motivate improvement in these practices (e.g., Hafner-Burton, 2005;Cao, Greenhill and Prakash, 2012). Synthesizing the insights from these studies with recent advances in the area of multilateral reputation (Crescenzi, 2007), I uncover when states will change human rights practices proactively when witnessing human rights sanctions against third parties. ...
... For example, Hafner-Burton (2005) demonstrates that enforceable human rights clauses in trade agreements are successful in motivating abusive regimes to improve human rights practices in order to maintain preferential access to partner states' markets. Studies also suggest that trade generally can foster the diffusion of human rights-respecting practices through the "California effect," wherein domestic groups in human rights-respecting, importing states demand improvements in the practices of their trade partners (Cao, Greenhill and Prakash, 2012). 7 Along similar lines, I argue below that some leaders will attempt to improve human rights practices if they perceive that sanctions could follow from continued abuse. ...
... Accordingly, a lower export share with the US suggests that it has more alternative markets that it can use to redirect trade if sanctioned by the US. 27 Furthermore, prior research also finds that exports can sometimes lead to improved respect for physical integrity rights (e.g., Hafner-Burton, 2005;Cao, Greenhill and Prakash, 2012). It is important to note that not all sanctions are export restrictions; for example, some affect investment in the target. ...
Although scholars have suggested that sanctions could have an international symbolic effect in which they inform third parties of sender preferences and resolve, studies have not examined whether and when sanctions against one state lead other states to change similar proscribed behavior. In this paper, I examine whether abusive regimes change their respect for physical integrity rights when they witness US human rights sanctions against third parties. Synthesizing contributions from the literatures on sanction effectiveness, reputation and human rights promotion, I develop a new theory asserting that human rights sanctions can motivate leaders in non-sanctioned states to improve their human rights practices proactivelyor at least to prevent worsened abusewhen they perceive themselves as sufficiently similar to the sanction target. I find support for my expectations in stratified Cox proportional hazards models using data spanning 1976-2000.
... Available in our replication materials. 38 Hafner-Burton 2005;Cao, Greenhill, and Prakash 2013;Apodaca 2001. 39 Barry, Clay, and Flynn 2013;Blanton and Blanton 2007a. ...
... 80 Spar 1998. 81 Cao, Greenhill, and Prakash 2013. ...
Does the attention of human rights organizations limit exports from rights-abusing states? This article examines how naming and shaming by human rights organizations (HROs) conditions the influence of human rights abuse on exports, and argues that human rights abuse alone is insufficient to damage a state’s exports. However, as attention to abuse via HRO shaming increases, abuse has an increasingly negative impact on exports. Importantly, this relationship is also conditional on the respect for human rights among importing states; human rights abuse, even if it is shamed, has no effect when importers are similarly abusive. Empirical tests utilizing gravity models of trade incorporating data on physical integrity rights abuse and HRO shaming in 1990–2008 yield strong support for our expectations.
... In recent years, there have been two, seemingly distinct, lines of inquiry into the relationship between trade and human rights. One group of recent studies examines the role of trade partners in facilitating improvement in human rights practices via inducements for respect or penalties for abuse (Cao et al. 2013;Hafner-Burton 2005b;Wood 2008;Peksen 2009). The second, relatively less explored research area has produced the finding that a higher reliance on resource exports is associated with greater levels of repression (De-Meritt and Young 2013;DeMeritt 2013, see also Smith 2008;Bueno de Mesquita and Smith 2009). ...
... Conversely, unenforceable clauses have no impact, given the lack of meaningful incentive for leaders to discontinue repressive practices that benefit their regime. Similarly, the "California E↵ect," wherein importing groups in wealthy states demand improvement in exporters' human rights in exchange for market access, has been shown to extend to international trade (Cao et al. 2013). These cases could be considered variants of an international transaction model of human rights respect, given that leaders are giving up some of their ability to repress in exchange for material benefits. ...
In this article, I synthesize a number of recent studies exploring how exports affect human rights, highlighting a common implication that this relationship is conditional on how exports are associated with leaders’ relative costs of repression and accommodation. Beginning with this synthesis, I develop a theory demonstrating how the composition of exports affects human rights via its impact on leader expectations. More diverse exports promote continued growth and prosperity, provide leaders with greater resources, and suggest conditions less conducive to severe dissent, all of which reduce the relative costs of accommodation. Repression is likely to threaten the benefits otherwise associated with greater export diversity; thus its relative cost increases amid greater export diversity. I test this theory using commodity-level data from the United Nations Comtrade database to create a country-year-level measure of export diversity. Statistical analyses spanning 1981 to 2009 support my expectation. My results are robust to sample restrictions and the use of instrumental variables.
... Indeed, during this period, states have turned to bilateral and regional channels in lieu of multilateral progress on trade and investment. Notably, bilateral and regional agreements contain a much higher degree of regulatory coordination among members, including a growing number of binding standards on labor, the environment, and human rights (Lim, Mosley, and Prakash 2015;Greenhill, Mosley, and Prakash 2009;Cao, Greenhill, and Prakash 2013;European Commission 2008). Erin Hannah, Silke Trommer, and Adrienne Roberts have documented the growth in free trade agreements that have dedicated chapters on gender equality (Hannah, Roberts, and Trommer 2021). ...
The past two decades have witnessed growing concern about the challenges governments face in regulating multinational corporations. Trade and investment agreements play a crucial role in setting the regulatory regime that governs these transnational activities. The multilateral trade and investment regime has been experiencing a period of crisis, with the collapse of proceedings at the World Trade Organization’s appellate body and the failure of the Doha Development Round. During this period, states have turned to unilateral, bilateral and regional channels in lieu of multilateral progress. Bilateral and regional agreements contain a much higher degree of regulatory coordination among members, including a growing number of binding standards on labor, the environment and human rights which apply to multinational corporations operating across the trading blocs. This paper reviews three cases of states, or groups of states, endeavoring to impose binding regulation on multinational corporations through the trade and investment regime. This paper argues, that these efforts, while partial, form the basis for a new multilateral trade and investment regime that holds corporations accountable. It shows that during the multilateral system’s period of crisis, as states in both the Global North and Global South have pursued their own strategies and shown a shared commitment to increasing their regulatory capacity, the policy consensus among practitioners at the multilateral level has shifted towards accommodating these efforts. Together, this paper argues, these developments lay the groundwork for a new multilateral model of trade and corporate accountability.
... The EU has utilized human rights missionary activities internally, in the near neighborhood, and outside the region at the global level. 13 By example of intersections of norm proselyting between internal members and near neighborhood efforts, potential EU members faced human rights provision requirements present within the Copenhagen criteria (1973) and the wording of the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997), which set standards for "liberty, democracy, respect for human rights, and fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law, principles which must be upheld 11 Cao et al. (2012) and de Búrca (2011). 12 Barnett and Finnemore (1999, p. 711). ...
This book considers contested responsibilities between the public and private sectors over the use of online data, detailing exactly how digital human rights evolved in specific European states and gradually became a part of the European Union framework of legal protections. The author uniquely examines why and how European lawmakers linked digital data protection to fundamental human rights, something heretofore not explained in other works on general data governance and data privacy. In particular, this work examines the utilization of national and European Union institutional arrangements as a location for activism by legal and academic consultants and by first-mover states who legislated digital human rights beginning in the 1970s. By tracing the way that EU Member States and non-state actors utilized the structure of EU bodies to create the new norm of digital human rights, readers will learn about the process of expanding the scope of human rights protections within multiple dimensions of European political space. The project will be informative to scholar, student, and layperson, as it examines a new and evolving area of technology governance – the human rights of digital data use by the public and private sectors.
Rebekah Dowd is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Midwestern University in Texas. Rebekah’s research focuses on human rights within data policy, the online behavior of individuals and states, and policy decision-making by European politicians. Dr. Dowd teaches courses in global studies, international relations, comparative and foundational politics, European politics, and international political economy.
... The EU has utilized human rights missionary activities internally, in the near neighborhood, and outside the region at the global level. 13 By example of intersections of norm proselyting between internal members and near neighborhood efforts, potential EU members faced human rights provision requirements present within the Copenhagen criteria (1973) and the wording of the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997), which set standards for "liberty, democracy, respect for human rights, and fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law, principles which must be upheld 11 Cao et al. (2012) and de Búrca (2011). 12 Barnett and Finnemore (1999, p. 711). ...
The final chapter of the book discusses the implications of the book’s findings for social science. Several future concerns emerge. For the European Union to continue supranational data management and technology governance, it must address feelings of democratic deficit among EU citizens. Second, as many EU states continue to suffer from terror attacks, state authorities increasingly rely upon data surveillance to forego risk, threatening the provision of digital human rights. Furthermore, exogeneous shocks such as the Covid-19 pandemic have caused governments to utilize personal data monitoring to manage public health, again crossing boundaries set by data protection legislation. Though the EU has shown itself willing to hold third parties responsible for protecting EU citizens’ data, states like China and the US, and data brokers, are increasingly pushing back against the EU view of digital human rights. As with all human rights, digital human rights are fragile.
... Greenhill et al. (2009) report that, among developing countries, respect for collective labor rights among one's export partners is associated, all else equal, with improvement in one's own labor rights. Other analyses suggest that this "California effect" holds for the trade-based diffusion of human rights generally (Cao, Greenhill, & Prakash, 2013). More recently, Adolph et al (2017) consider the flipside of this effect: when African countries shift their exports toward Chinese markets, they experience a limited "Shanghai effect." ...
We explore and provide an empirical assessment of an important mechanism by which global markets can motivate labor‐related upgrading among developing country firms. New market opportunities, which result from exogenous shocks, can some producers to improve their treatment of workers. These improvements come because they are consistent with taking advantage of new opportunities. We focus specifically on how shifts in U.S. trade policy toward China in 2018 affect the willingness of foreign firms operating in Vietnam to engage in upgrading. Our analyses, based on surveys of firms in 2016, 2017, and 2018, suggest that firms respond significantly to changes in market opportunities, especially when they are primed to consider specific supply chain relationships. This market opportunity mechanism for upgrading contrasts with another widely used tool, in which developed country governments condition access to their markets upon improved human and labor rights outcomes. The former operates, in the short to medium term, at the firm level, while the latter seeks to effect change at the country level.
... 2. Hardly any statistical studies find negative effects of FDI on rights (Clark & Kwon, 2018;Smith et al., 1999). Many quantitative studies find that there is no significant link, possibly because positive and negative effects from different industry sectors cancel each other out when aggregate FDI is used (Cao et al., 2013;Sorens & Ruger, 2012 ...
... 2. Hardly any statistical studies find negative effects of FDI on rights (Clark & Kwon, 2018;Smith et al., 1999). Many quantitative studies find that there is no significant link, possibly because positive and negative effects from different industry sectors cancel each other out when aggregate FDI is used (Cao et al., 2013;Sorens & Ruger, 2012 ...
The consequences of foreign direct investment (FDI) for human rights protection are poorly understood. We propose that the impact of FDI varies across industries. In particular, extractive firms in the oil and mining industries go where the resources are located and are bound to such investment, which creates a status quo bias among them when it comes to supporting repressive rulers (“ location-bound effect”). The same is not true for nonextractive multinational corporations (MNCs) in manufacturing or services, which can, in comparison, exit problematic countries more easily. We also propose that strong democratic institutions can alleviate negative impacts of extractive FDI on human rights (“ democratic safeguard effect”). Using U.S. FDI broken up into extractive and nonextractive industries in 157 host countries (1999–2015), we find support for these propositions. ¹ Extractive FDI is associated with more human rights abuse, but nonextractive FDI is associated with less abuse, after controlling for other factors, including concerns about endogeneity. We find also that the negative human rights impact of extractive FDI vanishes in countries where democratic institutions are stronger. Our results are robust to a range of alternative estimation techniques.
... Although some European firms may hope to flee from these higher standards when sourcing product abroad, European shareholders, consumers and regulators are inclined to hold their firms to higher standards (Nikolaeva and Bicho 2011;Rathert 2016). The same logic that implies that trade with higher-standards countries can improve labor standards abroad (Cao et al. 2013;Greenhill et al. 2009) also suggests that firms from countries with higher laborstandards should be more likely to participate in labor-protecting arrangements when sourcing from overseas. European firms may be more inclined than their US-based counterparts to view their relationships with NGOs as cooperative rather than adversarial; Sasser et al. (2006) cite this difference as helping to explain forestry sector firms' choices between the NGO-sponsored and industry-backed private governance efforts. ...
Most research on private governance examines the design and negotiation of particular initiatives or their operation and effectiveness once established, with relatively little work on why firms join in the first place. We contribute to this literature by exploring firms’ willingness to participate in two recent, high-profile private initiatives established in the aftermath of the Rana Plaza disaster in the Bangladesh ready-made garment (RMG) sector: the Accord on Building and Fire Safety and the Alliance for Worker Safety in Bangladesh. Using novel shipment-level data from U.S. customs declarations, we generate a set of firms that were “eligible” to join these remediation initiatives. We are able to positively attribute only a minority of US RMG imports from Bangladesh to Accord and Alliance signatories. Firms with consumer-facing brands, publicly-traded firms, and those importing more RMG product from Bangladesh were more likely to sign up for the Accord and Alliance. Firms headquartered in the USA were much less likely to sign onto remediation plans, especially the Accord.
... Finally, foreign trading partners may have explicit preferences regarding the political regime in the region if they are committed to democracy promotion (foreign governments) or are under strict pressure from public opinion in terms of corporate social responsibility (companies). There is evidence that the trade dependence of the sort described here can be used to promote democracy if so desired (Cao et al. 2013). Furthermore, there may be other factors for the transmission of democratic values at play in relation to trade relations (e.g., mutual learning). ...
Which limitations does the hegemon face when exerting financial statecraft through multilateral institutions? Recent studies indicate that intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) that are tools of collective financial statecraft sponsored by the United States, like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, lead developing states to align with Washington in the United Nations (UN). The same effect is verified in the case of US bilateral aid. Little, however, has been discussed about the effect of American-sponsored regional development banks (RDBs) in the same context. RDBs are IGOs with unique characteristics as each of them covers a region of the world and relies on resources from developed sponsors and developing borrowing members alike. In this article we aim to fill this gap in the debates on economic and financial statecraft by demonstrating through tobit models that the higher the material capabilities of a borrowing state that takes loans, the less likely it is to align with the United States at the UN General Assembly (UNGA). Membership of all RDBs but the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) yields the same effect. Results indicate the need to develop further research on RDBs to assess whether they create incentives for challenging the hegemon.
... This is similar toGreenhill, Mosley, and Prakash (2009), who show that labor institutions in importing countries affect the labor laws of exporting countries (although they affect labor practices to a lesser degree), and toCao, Greenhill and Prakash (2013), who show that importer countries with good human rights records can diffuse good behavior to the exporter countries. 91 Similar toSorens and Ruger (2012), however, we find no effect for the stock of FDI. ...
This article argues that the broad and legally enforceable protection that bilateral investment treaties (BITs) offer to foreign investors worsens the human rights practices of developing countries. BITs lock in initial conditions attractive to investors that are linked to vertical investment flows and investment and trade competition. They also constrain the provision of welfare benefits or basic infrastructure. The lock-in and constraining effects are sources of popular grievance and dissent in states that host foreign investment. BIT-protected investor rights, however, limit the ability of governments to back-down vis-à-vis investors, lowering the relative cost of human rights violations. Finally, this study suggests that democratic regimes mitigate the negative effect of BITs. Evidence from 113 developing countries from 1981 to 2009 supports the hypotheses.
... Arguably, BITs with advanced democracies protect the rights of investors and, at the same time, could "export" the human rights standards of such advanced democracies to the investment host countries (or at a minimum not hurt human rights). This would be similar to Greenhill et al. (2009) showing that labor institutions in importing countries affect the labor laws of exporting countries (although they affect less labor practice) or Cao et al. (2013) who show that importer countries with good human rights records can diffuse good behavior to the exporter countries. ...
Does globalization just create welfare gains, or is it accompanied by lower accountability, reduced welfare provision, labor standards or human rights? We argue that the broad and legally enforceable protection offered to foreign investors by bilateral investment treaties (BITs) worsens the human rights practices of developing countries. In such countries, BITs lock-in initial conditions attractive to investors that tend to be linked to vertical investment flows and investment and trade competition, including tax incentives and low environmental standards or labor rights. BITs also constrain the provision of welfare benefits, basic infrastructure and investment in environmentally friendly technologies. The lock-in and constraining effects of BITs are sources of popular grievance and dissent in states that host foreign investment. BIT protected investor rights, however, limit the ability of governments to back-down vis-à-vis investors, lowering the relative cost of human rights violations. Finally, we argue that democracies have higher accountability and a lower threat perception for dissent, mitigating the negative effect of BITs. Evidence from 113 developing countries from 1981 to 2009 supports our hypotheses.
... Table A1 (in the Appendix) for a list of sample countries. 2. In contrast, trade scholars have considered the trade-based diffusion of other sorts of policies, such as economic liberalization and human rights, using broad measures of performance (Cao, Greenhill, & Prakash, 2013;Greenhill et al., 2009;Simmons & Elkins, 2004). 3. The absence of environmental standards in South-South trade agreements may reflect the norm of noninterference that pervades in South-South relations (Acharya, 2009). ...
A large scholarship surrounds the relationship between trade and the environment, with much of it centering on whether trade produces a race to the bottom or a race to the top in the environments of developing countries. While the effects of trade on key pollutants and on specific environmental policies have been widely attended to, scholars have not yet considered if and how trade impacts developing nations’ environmental performance, broadly speaking. This is a critical matter, as the effects of trade on the environment can only be appreciated fully through holistic assessment of the environment and environmental protection. The study that follows helps to fill this void through analysis of an all-inclusive measure of environmental performance that encompasses indicators of policy and practice. Findings demonstrate that exporting to the United States and the European Union improves environmental performance in developing countries; however, no such effect accompanies trade with other countries.
... State capacity is divided in two concepts: control of territory measured using tax revenue per GDP and control of agents measured by corruption indicators from the International Country Risk Guide (ICRG) data. Trade expands the prospect of better human rights practices through economic development or facilitates the diffusion of human rights norms through pressure from consumers and activist groups in importing countries directed towards exporting countries (Cao et al. 2013). Trade is measured by the ratio of trade to GDP. ...
This article argues that human rights improvements are hard to achieve even in democracies because elites and citizens may not want to sacrifice other policy goals for human rights reforms even though both elites and citizens are believed to prefer better human rights protections. Improving human rights is a costly job that requires capacity to deter or reconcile with opposition against reforms, rationales and incentives to break bureaucratic rigidity, and the people’s consent to use resources, as well as sound institutions and higher levels of economic development. Without changes in domestic preferences or resources that are exogenous to domestic institutions and somewhat susceptible to international factors—including changes in power structures, norm diffusion, transactions, and assistance—democratic leaders have little to do beyond supporting current practices in order not to be voted out. Using dynamic ordered probit models, this article assesses whether the democratic effect decreases human rights violations or prevents more violations than current levels. The results indicate that low levels of human rights violations are not more likely to emerge under democratic governments compared to other types of regimes, but low levels of violations are more likely to continue in democracies, which suggest that democratic institutions are effective in maintaining good practices rather than creating them. Demonstrating the limited nature of the democratic effect, this article also lends insight into the alternative causal routes involving international contexts for the improvement of human rights.
... Key actors in importing countries (such as environmental groups, human rights groups, and trade unions) pressured importing firms to improve on these counts, who in turn influenced their suppliers abroad. Scholars report on the positive influence of bilateral export pressures on environmental issues (Perkins & Neumayer, 2007), labor issues (Greenhill, Mosley, & Prakash, 2009), and human rights (Cao, Greenhill, & Prakash, 2013) in developing countries. ...
... We do so by asking how, in the context of workers' rights, foreign aid and trade shape governments' incentives to enact laws vis-à-vis their labor force. 4 We suggest that, while bilateral trade serves as an important mechanism for the diffusion of laws influencing labor rights (Greenhill, Mosley, & Prakash, 2009;Cao, Greenhill, & Prakash, 2013), foreign aid can intervene, unexpectedly, in the workings of such trade-based diffusion mechanisms. Because aid serves as an alternative source of external funds for governments, our intuition is that it might render recipient governments less likely to accede to the demands of actors based in their key export markets. ...
... Finally, foreign trading partners may have explicit preferences regarding the political regime in the region if they are committed to democracy promotion (foreign governments) or are under strict pressure from public opinion in terms of corporate social responsibility (companies). There is evidence that the trade dependence of the sort described here can be used to promote democracy if so desired (Cao et al. 2013). Furthermore, there may be other factors for the transmission of democratic values at play in relation to trade relations (e.g., mutual learning). ...
The paper investigates the interplay of economic development and democratization in Russian regions. It introduces the new concept of a limiting factor, i.e., a particular resource with a highly localized source that is crucial for economic development. Based on both econometric analysis and detailed case studies, the paper shows that for a large subset of Russian regions, access to trade with the countries of the former Soviet Union constitutes a limiting factor, which on one hand is necessary to sustain economic growth but on the other strengthens the likelihood of a nondemocratic outcome in local regime transition. We also provide some tentative conjectures regarding other instances of a limiting factor that can be found worldwide both currently and historically.
Prominent theories of state formation hold that states formed because of warfare and competition on the one hand, or the diffusion of organizational templates and practices through learning and emulation on the other. We propose that the two strands of theory can be linked to more accurately account for mechanisms of state formation. War, we argue, is an important source of social diffusion. War establishes contacts between political elites across borders, generates migratory flows, and establishes new economic networks. We examine the validity of the theory through a comparative case study of Nordic political units from the dawn of the Viking Age to the end of the High Middle Ages (CE 800–1300), finding that raids, settlements, and conquests by Norwegian and Danish rulers in England, Europe's most advanced kingdom, set in motion state formation processes in Norway and Denmark. In these cases, the winners emulated the losers.
This paper examines how protests spread across countries in the 2011 Arab Spring. Based on the diffusion literature, we form hypotheses about the factors that influence the transmission of protests across borders. To test the hypotheses, we use an events data set measuring media reports of protests, government reforms, and acts of repression on a daily basis by country. We show that the strength of the protest movement in one country is significantly affected by protest activities in other countries over the previous 1 or 2 weeks and that protests were more likely to spread between countries that had high levels of bilateral trade. When we examine periods longer than 2 weeks, we find that protests spread across borders only when they were successful in pressuring Arab governments into enacting reforms and when the protests did not lead to government reprisals. In all our models, government repression in one country significantly stifled protests in other countries. Each country was thus significantly affected by the choices that governments in other Arab League nations made, and this interdependence meant that governments had incentives to cooperate with each other in their responses to the Arab Spring protests.
Este artículo analiza cómo se extendieron las protestas a través de distintos países durante la Primavera Árabe de 2011. Basándonos en la literatura sobre difusión, formulamos hipótesis sobre los factores que influyen en la transmisión de las protestas a través de fronteras. Para comprobar nuestras hipótesis, utilizamos un conjunto de datos de eventos que miden la información de los medios de comunicación sobre las protestas, las reformas gubernamentales y los actos de represión a diario por país. Demostramos que la fuerza del movimiento de protesta en un país se ve significativamente afectada por las actividades de protesta en otros países durante la semana o las dos semanas anteriores y que las protestas eran más propensas a extenderse entre los países que tenían altos niveles de comercio bilateral. Cuando examinamos periodos superiores a dos semanas, comprobamos que las protestas se extienden a través de las fronteras solo cuando estas consiguen presionar a los gobiernos árabes para que promulguen reformas y cuando las protestas no provocan represalias por parte del gobierno. En todos nuestros modelos, la represión gubernamental en un país frenó significativamente las protestas en otros países. Por lo tanto, cada país se vio significativamente afectado por las decisiones que tomaron los gobiernos de otras naciones de la Liga Árabe, y esta interdependencia significó que los gobiernos tenían incentivos para cooperar entre sí en sus respuestas a las protestas de la Primavera Árabe.
Le présent article analyse la manière dont les protestations se sont propagées à travers les pays lors du Printemps arabe de 2011. Sur la base de la documentation diffusée, nous émettons des hypothèses sur les facteurs ayant influencé la transmission des protestations à travers les frontières. Afin de vérifier les hypothèses, nous utilisons un ensemble de données d’événements évaluant les comptes-rendus que les médias ont fait des protestations, des réformes du gouvernement et des actes de répression, jour après jour et par pays. Nous montrons que la force du mouvement de protestation dans un pays est affectée de manière significative par les actes de protestation dans d’autres pays au cours de la ou des deux semaines précédentes, et que les protestations avaient beaucoup plus de chance de s’étendre entre des pays ayant des niveaux élevés de commerce bilatéral. Lorsqu’on examine des périodes supérieures à deux semaines, on observe que les protestations se propagent à travers les frontières uniquement lorsqu’elles ont réussi à faire pression sur les gouvernements arabes pour qu’ils adoptent des réformes et lorsque ces protestations n’ont pas entraîné de représailles de la part du gouvernement. Dans tous nos modèles, la répression du gouvernement dans un pays a sensiblement étouffé les protestations dans les autres pays. Chaque pays était donc affecté de manière significative par les choix effectués par les gouvernements dans les autres nations de la Ligue arabe, et cette interdépendance signifiait que les gouvernements avaient intérêt à coopérer les uns avec les autres quant à leur réponse face aux protestations du Printemps arabe.
Official development assistance (ODA) refers to aid intended to promote economic development and wellbeing in developing countries. The effect of ODA from Western donors continues to be debated, but the impact of aid from non-Western countries such as China is a relatively new field of inquiry and analysis. Using data on Western ODA and a new dataset of “ODA-like” disbursements from China, this article analyzes the relationship between bilateral aid receipts from three sources—the United States, major European donors, and China—and two sets of human rights practices: physical integrity and “empowerment” (i.e., civil and political) rights. Analyses are conducted using panel fixed-effects regression models with and without instrumental variables. U.S. ODA, in particular, improves human rights in recipient countries. Estimated effects of bilateral ODA from European donors and China are far less robust. These results suggest that U.S. aid is not as ineffective nor Chinese aid as pernicious as is commonly assumed.
This chapter looks at the ways in which states and organizations leverage international relationships to promote global norm diffusion. By examining norm socialization within the Privacy Shield and Safe Harbour agreements, the EU-US relationship serves as an example of intentional norm socialization by the European Union. Additional case evidence for intentional norm exportation is provided by the landmark Schrems I and II cases against Facebook. The chapter finishes with a look at EU enforcement sanctions against non-state actors, including hefty fines against high-profile MNCs, such as Google and H&M, for failing to meet the digital human rights standards of the GDPR.
Does it matter whether human rights (HR) shaming is accompanied by acknowledgments of reforms and progress? Do such acknowledgments weaken or strengthen the impact of shaming? Rulers decide whether to oppress or to comply with HR treaty obligations by considering what compliance entails and by weighing the internal and external costs and benefits of oppression. Research shows that HR shaming alters such considerations and is associated with changes in HR protection levels. Can the same be said of faming? This article examines three forms of HR reporting: faming, which focuses on positive developments; shaming, which focuses on problematic HR practices; and scrutiny, which combines shaming and faming. The article analyzes the association between shaming, faming, and scrutiny by UN treaty bodies, on the one hand, and oppression on the other. The potential associations are conceptualized as mitigation, backsliding, and specification. The analysis finds that shaming with no faming and faming with no shaming are each negatively associated with HR protection. Scrutiny, the combination of shaming and faming, is positively associated with subsequent HR protection levels, and the higher the level of scrutiny the higher the subsequent level of HR protection. The article argues that the reason for this association is that the combination of shaming and faming helps policymakers understand how to properly implement their treaty obligations and how to improve HR protection. The article draws policy and theoretical implications including the need for balanced and detailed HR reporting, and the importance of learning in HR advocacy.
This article looks at the linkages between export to the European Union (EU), export to china and human rights policies. The article argues that countries that export to the EU at high rates are more likely to converge towards its policies than countries that don’t export to the EU. The article also argues that the rise of China as a significant economic actor does not undermine this process. The article tests these arguments by analysing the links between human rights protection in the EU and in China, and export to the EU and to China, on the one hand, and human rights protection in all the countries for which there are data, on the other. The results indicate that countries’ human rights policies are positively associated with the EU’s human rights policies and this association is conditioned by countries’ levels of export to the EU. The results further indicate that export to China does not undermine this pattern. The article draws conceptual and policy implications.
What is the relationship between trade and social institutions in the developing world? The research literature is conflicted: Importing firms may demand that trading partners observe higher labor and environmental standards, or they may penalize higher standards that raise costs. This study uses new data on retailers and manufacturers to analyze how firm‐level trade responds to information about social standards. Contrary to the “race to the bottom” hypothesis, it finds that retail importers reward exporters for complying with social standards. In difference‐in‐differences estimates from over 2,000 manufacturing establishments in 36 countries, achieving compliance is associated with a 4% [1%, 7%] average increase in annual purchasing. The effect is driven largely by the apparel industry—a long‐term target of anti‐sweatshop social movements—suggesting that activist campaigns can shape patterns of global trade.
Research on transnational human rights promotion and democratization often assumes that human rights promotion and democratization promotion are the same. But evidences from recent studies give reasons to question this assumption. This article compares the EU’s influence on democratization and human rights reforms in 29 countries in East-Europe West-Asia, the Middle East, and North-Africa. The results indicate that the impact of the EU on human rights protection is more notable than its impact on democracy levels. The article explains these results based on the lower level of threat to regime survival as a result of human rights reform, compared to democratization; the transmission of a clear message regarding the importance of the issue of human rights to the EU and to the member states; and the strong economic leverage the EU possess. The article draws policy implications including matching each policy goal with the most effective instruments to achieve it. The most effective human rights promotion instrument is economic pressure whereas democratization is more influenced by emulation processes than by economic pressure.
Scholars have long debated whether trade leads to a ‘race to the bottom’ or to a ‘race to the top’ in the labour standards of developing countries. Recent literature has offered encouraging findings consistent with the latter theory: stringent labour laws diffuse from importing countries to their export partners in the developing world. This finding has advanced our understanding of trade and labour rights, but more fine-grained analysis can further clarify what sorts of bilateral trade partnerships generate diffusion. In particular, South–South trade appears not to be characterised by the competitive pressures and foreign policy norms that produce labour rights diffusion. As such, this study compares the diffusion effects of South–South trade to those of other types of trade, using data covering 104 developing countries from 1986 to 2011. Results demonstrate that South–South trade is not accompanied by diffusion of labour laws, in contrast to other types of trade. This finding has important implications: whereas empirical results in earlier work suggest that developing countries will experience labour rights betterment if they export intensively to partners with stringent labour standards, my findings clarify that this will not occur if those partners are countries of the Global South.
Why do autocrats hold multiparty elections? This article argues that transitions to electoral authoritarianism (EA) follow a strategic calculus in which autocrats balance international incentives to adopt elections against the costs and risks of controlling them. It tests this hypothesis with a multinomial logit model that simultaneously predicts transitions to EA and democracy, using a sample of non-electoral autocracies from 1946–2010. It finds that pro-democratic international leverage – captured by dependence on democracies through trade ties, military alliances, international governmental organizations and aid – predicts EA adoption. Socio-economic factors that make voters easier to control, such as low average income and high inequality, also predict EA transition. In contrast, since democratization entails a loss of power for autocrats, it is mainly predicted by regime weakness rather than international engagement or socio-economic factors. The results demonstrate that different forms of liberalization follow distinct logics, providing insight into autocratic regime dynamics and democracy promotion’s unintended effects.
The impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on repression in developing nations is still disputed. Some argue that FDI improves economic development and exports human rights values. Others criticise the exploitation of cheap labour and resources, which may lead to tensions and government oppression. Previous studies have employed aggregate FDI data, with conflicting results. Alternatively, I propose that the effects depend on what kind of FDI enters a country. I build a sectoral framework to discuss how skills and technology levels, as well as the motivation for FDI, can mediate the impact. I then examine the link in a panel data analysis (1983-2010) in 121 countries, integrating sectoral FDI in several resource, manufacturing and service industries. The results show that investment in high-skilled and -tech sectors has positive effects. The results are robust across several measures for repression, and when accounting for sector size, regional and time effects.
In 2004, Sudan won a third term on the Human Rights Commission at the very moment its government was carrying out a genocide in Darfur. The juxtaposition exposed the abysmal job the global governance system has done of living up to its responsibilities under the Genocide Convention (1948), which requires states both to prevent genocide and punish perpetrators (Convention on Genocide, 1948). Despite continuing failures, however, over the past two decades, the duty to punish has begun to be fulfilled. The establishment of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the International Criminal Court, and other post-conflict and transitional justice processes have given institutional power to a new norm of international criminal accountability, which has spread across the globe, rapidly albeit unevenly, in what Kathryn Sikkink has called a ‘justice cascade’ (Sikkink 2011).
This article discusses empirical research in political science on the topics of business and human rights, and transnational governance networks. It argues that transnational governance networks confront norm clashes and power conflicts, which undermine their effectiveness and legitimacy. Transnational governance as a concept and approach to ordering is therefore in need of meta-governance, by which the article understands secondary rules and procedures - that is, institutional mechanisms that allow for the mitigation and resolution of these conflicts. However, the extent to which such meta-governance currently exists, its effectiveness, and the rules and procedures that may legitimately define meta-governance and its actors are still unknown. This article calls for a research agenda to investigate these unknowns, which combines normative-legal and empirical-political science perspectives on the nature, form, legitimacy and effects of meta-governance.
Chapter examines how governments view linkage of trade and human rights and what policymakers are doing to include human rights obligations or aspirational language in their FTAs.
It is often argued that internationally recognized human rights are common to all cultural traditions and adaptable to a great variety of social structures and political regimes. Such arguments confuse human rights with human dignity. All societies possess conceptions of human dignity, but the conception of human dignity underlying international human rights standards requires a particular type of “liberal” regime. This conclusion is reached through a comparison of the social structures of ideal type liberal, minimal, traditional, communist, corporatist and developmental regimes and their impact on autonomy, equality, privacy, social conflict, and the definition of societal membership.
International human rights treaties have been ratified by many nation-states, including those ruled by repressive governments, raising hopes for better practices in many corners of the world. Evidence increasingly suggests, however, that human rights laws are most effective in stable or consolidating democracies or in states with strong civil society activism. If so, treaties may be failing to make a difference in those states most in need of reform — the world's worst abusers — even though they have been the targets of the human rights regime from the very beginning. The authors address this question of compliance by focusing on the behavior of repressive states in particular. Through a series of cross-national analyses on the impact of two key human rights treaties, the article demonstrates that (1) governments, including repressive ones, frequently make legal commitments to human rights treaties, subscribing to recognized norms of protection and creating opportunities for socialization and capacity-building necessary for lasting reforms; (2) these commitments mostly have no effects on the world's most terrible repressors even long into the future; (3) recent findings that treaty effectiveness is conditional on democracy and civil society do not explain the behavior of the world's most abusive governments; and (4) realistic institutional reforms will probably not help to solve this problem.
A growing number of studies provide quantitative evidence that economic globalization encourages government protection of human rights: trade and investment advance civil and political rights and encourage governments to refrain from violations of the right to life, liberty, and the security of the person. Other studies provide evidence that globalization promotes government repression of human rights: the arbitrary arrest, torture, forced disappearance, or extra-judicial killing of citizens, activists, or dissidents by state security forces under the control of ruling state elites. This article employs a variant of Extreme Bounds Analysis in order to analyze the robustness of this growing body of important but contradictory inferences. It argues that (1) we can make robust empirical claims about the relationship between certain trade and investment indicators and government repression, but shows that (2) cumulative knowledge across studies nevertheless remains limited by the sensitivity of many indicators to conditioning sets of information. This problem stems from vaguely specified theoretical mechanisms linking economic processes to government repression and is of potentially great consequence for scholarship seeking to explain the causes of human rights violations, in particular, and the effects of economic globalization, in general.
The propensity score is the conditional probability of assignment to a particular treatment given a vector of observed covariates. Both large and small sample theory show that adjustment for the scalar propensity score is sufficient to remove bias due to all observed covariates. Applications include: (i) matched sampling on the univariate propensity score, which is a generalization of discriminant matching, (ii) multivariate adjustment by subclassification on the propensity score where the same subclasses are used to estimate treatment effects for all outcome variables and in all subpopulations, and (iii) visual representation of multivariate covariance adjustment by a two- dimensional plot.
Formal acceptance of international agreements on human rights has progressed to the point where currently over three-quarters of the UN member states are parties to the International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights. In fact, becoming a party to this covenant seems to be concomitant with joining the UN. Of the newly independent states in Eastern Europe and in the region of the former Soviet Union, only Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Moldova, and Macedonia have not joined the treaty. This article tests empirically whether becoming a party to this international treaty (and its optional protocol) has an observable impact on the state party's actual behavior. The hypothesis is tested across 178 countries over an eighteen-year period (1976-93) and across four different measures of state human rights behavior. Initial bivariate analyses demonstrate some statistically significant differences between the behavior of states parties and the behavior of non-party states. However, this difference does not appear in the bivariate analysis that compares the states parties' behavior before becoming a party to the treaty with their behavior after becoming a party state. When the analysis progresses to more sophisticated multivariate analysis, in which factors known to affect human rights are controlled, the impact of the covenant and its optional protocol disappears altogether. Overall, this study suggests that it may be overly optimistic to expect that being a party to this international covenant will produce an observable direct impact.
By directly affecting democratization, globalization, domestic conflict, and interstate conflict, the end of the Cold War was hypothesized to exert an indirect effect on the propensity of governments to respect the human rights of their citizens. The findings for a sample of 79 countries showed that torture, disappearances, and extrajudicial killings continued at about the same rate even after the Cold War ended. However, after the end of the Cold War, there was significant improvement in government respect for the right against political imprisonment. Contrary to expectations, it was found that governments that decreased their involvement in interstate conflict or experienced decreased domestic conflict did not tend to increase respect for the right against political imprisonment. As hypothesized, it was found that governments that became more democratic or increased their participation in the global economy after the end of the Cold War tended to manifest higher levels of respect for the right of their citizens not to be politically imprisoned. However, a closer look at several recent examples of democratization in Africa suggests that any human rights improvements resulting from post-Cold War democratization may be short-lived. In the cases examined, improved government respect for the right against political imprisonment resulted from short-term manipulations by the leaders of `illiberal' or `demonstration' democracies who were not committed to democratization or to the advancement of the human rights of their citizens.
Despite the frequency with which scholars have utilized the Political Terror Scale (PTS), a surprising number of questions remain regarding the origins of the scale, the coding scheme it employs, and its conceptualization of "state terror." This research note attempts to clarify these issues. We also take this opportunity to compare the PTS with the Cingranelli and Richards Human Rights Data Project (CIRI). Although the PTS and CIRI are coded from the same source material and capture the same class of human rights violations, we observe some important differences between the two that we believe may be of interest to scholars in the quantitative human rights community. First, we believe that the CIRI claims a level of precision that is not possible given the source data from which both datasets are coded. We believe that the PTS offers a transparent coding system that recognizes the inherent limitations in measuring abuses of physical integrity rights. Second, we argue that the CIRI's method of summing across abuse types leads to some inappropriate categorizations. For instance, the absence of one type of abuse prevents a state from being coded into a more repressive overall category regardless of the levels of other types of abuse. Lastly, the PTS accounts for the "range" of violence committed by the statein short, what segments of the population are targeted. We believe that range is an important dimension to consider in measuring human rights and one to which CIRI does not attend.
The CIRI Human Rights Data Project provides information about government respect for a broad array of human rights in nearly every country in the world. Covering twenty-six years, fifteen separate human rights practices, and 195 countries, it is one of the largest human rights data sets in the world. This essay provides an overview of the CIRI project and our response to some critiques of the CIRI physical integrity rights index. Compared to the Political Terror Scale (PTS), the CIRI physical integrity rights index is focused on government human rights practices, can be disaggregated, is more transparent in its construction, and is more replicable because of the transparency of our coding rules. Furthermore, unlike the PTS, the unidimensionality of the CIRI index has been demonstrated empirically. For these reasons, the CIRI index is a more valid index of physical integrity rights.
This article investigates the nature of the linkages between trade and labor rights in developing countries. Specifically, we hypothesize that a “California effect” serves to transmit superior labor standards from importing to exporting countries, in a manner similar to the transmission of environmental standards. We maintain that, all else being equal, the labor standards of a given country are influenced not by its overall level of trade openness, but by the labor standards of its trading partners. We evaluate our hypothesis using a panel of 90 developing countries over the period 1986–2002, and we separately examine the extent to which the labor laws and the actual labor practices of the countries are influenced by those of their export destinations. We find that strong legal protections of collective labor rights in a country's export destinations are associated with more stringent labor laws in the exporting country. This California effect finding is, however, weaker in the context of labor rights practices, highlighting the importance of distinguishing between formal legislation and actual implementation of labor rights.
The authors examine the impact of the international human rights regime on governments' human rights practices. They propose an explanation that highlights a "paradox of empty promises." Their core arguments are that the global institutionalization of human rights has created an international context in which (1) governments often ratify human rights treaties as a matter of window dressing, radically decoupling policy from practice and at times exacerbating negative human rights practices, but (2) the emergent global legit-imacy of human rights exerts independent global civil society effects that improve states' actual human rights practices. The authors' statistical analyses on a comprehensive sample of government re-pression from 1976 to 1999 find support for their argument.
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Do countries comply with the requirements of human rights treaties that they join? Are these treaties effective in changing states' behavior for the better? This Article addresses these questions through a large-scale quantitative analysis of the relationship between human rights treaties and countries' human rights practices. The analysis relies on a database encompassing 166 nations over a nearly forty-year period in five areas of human rights law. The analysis finds that although the practices of countries that have ratified human rights treaties are generally better than those of countries that have not, noncompliance with treaty obligations appears common. More paradoxically, controlling for other factors that affect practices, it appears that treaty ratification is not infrequently associated with worse practices than otherwise expected. These findings can be explained in part, the Article contends, by the dual nature of treaties as both instrumental and expressive instruments. Treaties not only create binding law, but also declare or express the position of countries that ratify them. Because human rights treaties tend to be weakly monitored and enforced, countries that ratify may enjoy the benefits of this expression-including, perhaps, reduced pressure for improvements in practices-without bearing significant costs. This does not mean that human rights treaties do not have any positive influence, but simply that these positive effects may sometimes be offset or even outweighed by treaties' less beneficial effects. The Article concludes by considering better ways to help ensure that human rights treaties improve the lives of those they are meant to help.
Most studies posit and identify a linear and negative relationship between democracy and the violation of human rights. Some research challenges this finding, however, suggesting that nonlinear influences exist. Within this article, we examine the structure of the relationship between democracy and repression during the time period from 1976 to 1996. To conduct our analysis, we utilize diverse statistical approaches which are particularly flexible in identifying influences that take a variety of functional forms (specifically LOESS and binary decomposition). Across measures and methodological techniques, we found that below a certain level, democracy has no impact on human rights violations, but above this level democracy influences repression in a negative and roughly linear manner. The implications of this research are discussed within the conclusion.
One of the most important developments over the past three decades has been the spread of liberal economic ideas and policies throughout the world. These policies have affected the lives of millions of people, yet our most sophisticated political economy models do not adequately capture influences on these policy choices. Evidence suggests that the adoption of liberal economic practices is highly clustered both temporally and spatially. We hypothesize that this clustering might be due to processes of policy diffusion. We think of diffusion as resulting from one of two broad sets of forces: one in which mounting adoptions of a policy alter the benefits of adopting for others and another in which adoptions provide policy relevant information about the benefits of adopting. We develop arguments within these broad classes of mechanisms, construct appropriate measures of the relevant concepts, and test their effects on liberalization and restriction of the current account, the capital account, and the exchange rate regime. Our findings suggest that domestic models of foreign economic policy making are insufficient. The evidence shows that policy transitions are influenced by international economic competition as well as the policies of a country's sociocultural peers. We interpret the latter influence as a form of channeled learning reflecting governments' search for appropriate models for economic policy.
The international operations of firms have substantial impact on the formulation and implementation of business ethical principles such as codes of conduct. The international sporting goods industry has been a pioneer in setting up codes and thus provides much relevant experience. Different sourcing strategies, degrees of multinationality and national backgrounds affect the contents of codes. Moreover, international (non-governmental) organizations prove equally effective in triggering sophisticated codes.© 2001 JIBS. Journal of International Business Studies (2001) 32, 267–283
Democracy does not evolve sui generis. The spatial clustering in democracy and transitions suggests that international factors play a prominent role in forging democracies as well as influencing their durability. We argue that democracy often comes about as a result of changes in the relative power of important actors and groups as well as their evaluations of particular institutions, both of which are often influenced by forces outside the country in question. The scope and extent of connections with other democratic countries in a region can strengthen support for democratic reform and help sustain institutions in transitional democracies. Results from a transition model demonstrate that international factors can exert a strong influence on the prospects for transitions to democracy, and the spatial clustering in democracy and transitions cannot adequately be explained by the hypothesized domestic social requisites of individual countries.We are grateful for comments from Brian A Hearn, Kyle Beardsley, Nathaniel Beck, Scott Gates, H vard Hegre, David Lektzian, Jon Pevehouse, Dan Reiter, Kenneth Schultz, Heather Smith, H vard Strand, and Kaare Str m, the editors, and two anonymous reviewers, as well as the participants at the Conference on the International Diffusion of Democracy and Markets, University of California, Los Angeles, March 2003, and the Conference on the International Diffusion of Political and Economic Liberalization at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., October 2003.
A growing number of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have come to play a significant role in governing state compliance with human rights. When they supply hard standards that tie material benefits of integration to compliance with human rights principles, PTAs are more effective than softer human rights agreements (HRAs) in changing repressive behaviors. PTAs improve members human rights through coercion, by supplying the instruments and resources to change actors incentives to promote reforms that would not otherwise be implemented. I develop three hypotheses: (1) state commitment to HRAs and (2) PTAs supplying soft human rights standards (not tied to market benefits) do not systematically produce improvement in human rights behaviors, while (3) state commitment to PTAs supplying hard human rights standards does often produce better practices. I draw on several cases to illustrate the processes of influence and test the argument on the experience of 177 states during the period 1972 to 2002.I would like to thank Mike Colaresi, Dan Drezner, David Lake, Lisa Martin, Walter Mattli, John Meyer, Mark Pollack, Erik Voeten, Jim Vreeland, and two anonymous reviewers for their detailed and thoughtful comments on various drafts of this manuscript, as well as the many other people who have helped me by asking hard questions along the way. I would also like to thank Michael Barnett, Charles Franklin, and Jon Pevehouse for advice during the dissertation research that supports this article, and Alexander H. Montgomery for assistance in data management. All faults are my own. For generous assistance in the collection of data, I thank the National Science Foundation (SES 2CDZ414 and SES 0135422), John Meyer, and Francisco Ramirez. For support during the writing of the article, I thank Nuffield College at Oxford University, and most importantly, Lynn Eden and Stanford s Center for International Security and Cooperation.
This global cross-national study seeks to build upon earlier studies that have tested the impact of constitutional provisions upon state human rights behavior. I examine across a twenty-year period the impact of constitutional provisions for six individual freedoms and four due process rights on state abuse of the right to personal integrity. Here I find statistical evidence that some constitutional provisions do matter, even when controlling for democracy and for other factors known to influence human rights behavior. While none of the constitutional provisions for individual freedoms is statistically significant, two of the due process provisions (provisions for fair and public trials) do decrease substantially the likelihood that states will abuse their own citizens' human rights. The other two due process provisions, which have become almost universal, the ban against torture, and the writ of habeas corpus, are quite disappointing in that they do not produce the expected impact. Over the long term, the trial provisions would lead to a decrease of about one level in the personal integrity abuse score, which is only somewhat less than the impact produced by other variables in the model, such as population size.
This paper introduces the subject of private politics, presents a research agenda, and provides an example involving activists and a firm. Private politics addresses situations of conflict and their resolution without reliance on the law or government. It encompasses the political competition over entitlements in the status quo, the direct competition for support from the public, bargaining over the resolution of the conflict, and the maintenance of the agreed-to private ordering. The term private means that the parties do not rely on public order, i.e., lawmaking or the courts. The term politics refers to individual and collective action in situations in which people attempt to further their interests by imposing their will on others. Four models of private politics are discussed: (1) informational competition between an activist and a firm for support from the public, (2) decisions by citizen consumers regarding a boycott, (3) bargaining to resolve the boycott, and (4) the choice of an equilibrium private ordering to govern the ongoing conflicting interests of the activist and the firm.
This volume argues that international human rights law has made a positive contribution to the realization of human rights in much of the world. Although governments sometimes ratify human rights treaties, gambling that they will experience little pressure to comply with them, this is not typically the case. Focusing on rights stakeholders rather than the United Nations or state pressure, Beth Simmons demonstrates through a combination of statistical analyses and case studies that the ratification of treaties leads to better rights practices on average. By several measures, civil and political rights, women’s rights, a right not to be tortured in government detention, and children’s rights improve, especially in the very large heterogeneous set of countries that are neither stable autocracies nor stable democracies. Simmons argues that international human rights law should get more practical and rhetorical support from the international community as a supplement to broader efforts to address conflict, development, and democratization.
With the end of the Cold War economic issues moved to the fore of the international agenda. The integration of markets, dominated by multi-national corporations and orchestrated by international financial institutions, has many concerned for the political and economic rights of the common citizen. This is a comprehensive cross-national study examining the effect of globalization on the attainment of the subgroup of human rights known as personal integrity rights. The impact of global economic patterns on the attainment of these rights is mixed.
Relatively little research has focused on whether countries' political institutions affect their international trade relations. We address this issue by analyzing the relationship between regime type and trade policy. In a formal model of commercial policy, we establish that the ratification responsibility of the legislature in democratic states leads pairs of democracies to set trade barriers at a lower level than mixed country-pairs (composed of an autocracy and a democracy). We test this hypothesis by analyzing the effects of regime type on trade during the period from 1960 to 1990. The results of this analysis accord with our argument: Democratic pairs have had much more open trade relations than mixed pairs.
How do domestic political institutions, specifically veto players, mediate the effect of trade competition on regulatory races in the environmental area? Is the mediating effect more pronounced for more visible pollution issues such as air pollution in relation to less visible water pollution? Governments are expected to respond to trade pressures by lowering regulatory costs. To do so, governments can rewrite regulations (de jure policy change) and/or lower the enforcement of existing regulations (de facto policy change). In contrast with de facto changes, de jure policy changes are more likely to invite opposition from pro-environment constituencies, and are therefore politically more difficult. Our analysis of 140 countries for the period 1980–2003 suggests that in response to trade pressures, governments do not lower regulatory stringency by rewriting (de jure) environmental regulations for any level of domestic constraints. In contrast, when political constraints are low, governments respond to trade pressures by adjusting regulatory stringency via de facto changes. Moreover, in the context of de facto policy changes, the constraining effect of veto players is more pronounced for air pollution (sulphur dioxide) in comparison to water pollution (biochemical oxygen demand). This is because air pollution is a more visible pollution issue around which organized, urban constituencies tend to mobilize.
Contradictions associated with the growth in the power of capital suggest that the prevailing discourse and forces of globalising neoliberalism may have failed to gain more than temporary dominance or supremacy. A period of global recomposition of social forces may be emerging to reconfigure world order. A central task of global political economy is to theorise possibilities for a democratic transformation of world order, in the context of consciousness, culture, and material life, so as to transcend the oxymoron of neoliberal 'market civilisation'.
List of contributors Preface 1. The socialization of international human rights norms into domestic practices: introduction Thomas Risse and Kathryn Sikkink 2. Transnational activism and political change in Kenya and Uganda Hans Peter Schmitz 3. The long and winding road: international norms and domestic political change in South Africa David Black 4. Changing discourse: transnational advocacy networks in Tunisia and Morocco Sieglinde Granzer 5. Linking the unlinkable? International norms and nationalism in Indonesia and the Philippines Anja Jetschke 6. International norms and domestic politics in Chile and Guatemala Stephen C. Ropp and Kathryn Sikkink 7. The Helsinki accords and political change in Eastern Europe Daniel C. Thomas 8. International human rights norms and domestic change: conclusions Thomas Risse and Stephen C. Ropp List of references Index.
Since the Cold War ended, Western policymakers have sought to create security arrangements in Europe, as well as in other regions of the globe, that are based on international institutions. In doing so, they explicitly reject balance-of-power politics as an organizing concept for the post-Cold War world. During the 1992 presidential campaign, for example, President Clinton declared that, "in a world where freedom, not tyranny, is on the march, the cynical calculus of pure power politics simply does not compute. It is ill-suited to a new era." Before taking office, Anthony Lake, the president's national security adviser, criticized the Bush administration for viewing the world through a "classic balance of power prism," whereas he and Mr. Clinton took a "more 'neo- Wilsonian' view.
This crossnational study seeks to explain variations in governmental repression of human rights to personal integrity (state terrorism) in a 153-country sample during the eighties. We outline theoretical perspectives on this topic and subject them to empirical tests using a technique appropriate for our pooled cross-sectional time-series design, namely, ordinary least squares with robust standard errors and a lagged dependent variable. We find democracy and participation in civil or international war to have substantively important and statistically significant effects on repression. The effects of economic development and population size are more modest. The hypothesis linking leftist regime types to abuse of personal integrity rights receives some support. We find no reliable evidence that population growth, British cultural influence, military control, or economic growth affect levels of repression. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for scholars and practitioners concerned with the prevention of personal integrity abuse.
In this article we develop the theoretical properties of the propensity function, which is a generalization of the propensity score of Rosenbaum and Rubin. Methods based on the propensity score have long been used for causal inference in observational studies; they are easy to use and can effectively reduce the bias caused by nonrandom treatment assignment. Although treatment regimes need not be binary in practice, the propensity score methods are generally confined to binary treatment scenarios. Two possible exceptions have been suggested for ordinal and categorical treatments. In this article we develop theory and methods that encompass all of these techniques and widen their applicability by allowing for arbitrary treatment regimes. We illustrate our propensity function methods by applying them to two datasets; we estimate the effect of smoking on medical expenditure and the effect of schooling on wages. We also conduct simulation studies to investigate the performance of our methods.
Globalization critics argue that international trade spurs a race to the bottom among national environmental standards. ISO 14001 is the most widely adopted voluntary environmental regulation which encourages firms to take environmental action beyond what domestic government regulations require. Drawing on a panel study of 108 countries over seven years, we investigate conditions under which trade linkages can encourage ISO 14001 adoption, thereby countering environmental races to the bottom. We find that trade linkages encourage ISO 14001 adoption if countries' major export markets have adopted this voluntary regulation.
Human Rights Quarterly 18.2 (1996) 368-397
This study seeks to establish what effect multinational corporations have on human rights in the third world. Two theories of multinational corporations and human rights, the engines of development thesis and the Hymer thesis, serve as a point of departure. Using two different indicators of direct foreign investment to measure the presence of multinational corporations, this study finds them to be positively associated with political rights and civil liberties as well as with economic and social rights in the third world. This result supports the engines of development school. This study does not find any empirical evidence to support the Hymer thesis.
It is widely accepted that multinational corporations (MNCs) have a massive economic impact on third world nations. It is also a "tenet of faith among politicians, financiers, and academicians" that "economic development enhances human rights conditions." Yet the potential impact of MNCs on human rights in developing countries is often overlooked. International documents on human rights only rarely mention MNCs in any specific way, and theories and empirical studies of human rights stop short of considering the MNC as an actor in promoting human rights. Thus, there is a need for new research on rights, businesses, and development in the third world.
Discourse on the promotion of human rights and investigations into human rights violations have revolved primarily around nation-states. The politics of rights, legal protection of rights, and most philosophical treatments of human rights posit nations as the primary actors. All international documents on human rights limit liability for violations to "state parties."
Very few international initiatives address questions of regulating the behavior of multinational corporations. Those initiatives that do exist are voluntary and nonbinding. They focus on the economic impact of these enterprises, while only briefly or indirectly speaking of the corporate impact on rights. For instance, the UN Commission on Transnational Corporations has called on multinationals to: respect human rights; abstain from involvement in, and subversion of, domestic politics in host nations; practice nondiscrimination; respect host government priorities on employment, the environment, and socioeconomic policy; and cease collaboration with racist politicians in South Africa. Yet, these are only recommendations. There are basically no binding legal obligations on MNCs to promote or to protect human rights. Human rights obligations for transnationals as a function of legal rights obligations is a "null set."
Like politicians, human rights philosophers also commonly argue that rights obligations fall only upon governments. Rex Martin's views are a typical example. Like many others, he argues that human rights constitute principally claims against governments because practices for recognizing and maintaining rights are purely within the domain of public (state) actors. Martin disputes Maurice Cranston's well-known position that "human rights are rights of all individuals against all individuals." Martin points out that the documents themselves identify governments as parties to the various human rights agreements. States are responsible for establishing mechanisms to provide for the rights of due process, fair trials, nondiscrimination, etc. At most, Martin argues, human rights might be "'double-barreled,'" creating specific obligations for governments and more general obligations for society at large. The most significant responsibilities, however, remain those required of states.
Neither Martin nor Cranston, nor the schools of thought they represent, consider the possibility that human rights claims might create obligations for corporations as well. However, recent innovations in the philosophy of rights and in economic theory tend to stress the moral and social dimensions of MNCs. This growing body of literature can be understood to argue that corporations do have specific moral obligations regarding the protection and promotion of human rights. Hence, any empirical study of MNCs and human rights must necessarily address the philosophical distinction between legal rights and moral rights.
Perhaps the best of these new treatments is that by Peter French. French believes that the changing nature of postmodern politics and the socioeconomic influence of large corporations often make them more important than states when it comes to impacting day-to-day life: corporate entities "define and maintain human existence within the industrialized...
One school of thought in the literature on regulatory competition in environmental and consumer policy argues that inter-jurisdictional competition promotes regulatory laxity. The other highlights rent-seeking as a major driving force, implying that regulatory laxity is rare because rent-seeking is omnipresent. We observe that in most areas of environmental and consumer policy in advanced industrialized countries regulation has become much stricter since the 1970s. What then has been driving environmental and consumer risk regulation up? A popular explanation holds that large green jurisdictions have been forcing their trading partners to trade or ratchet up their regulation. In addition, political economists have developed bottom up explanations focusing on interest group politics and corporate behaviour. This article adds to the latter line by endogenising public perceptions and by exploring the effects of corporate environmental performance strategies on environmental and consumer risk policy. The empirical relevance of propositions is illustrated with case studies on growth hormones, electronic waste, and food safety.
We employ a polychotomous version of Mokken Scaling Analysis to create an improved measure of government respect for a subset of hhuman rights known as physica integrity rights. The scale we produce is shown to be unidimensional, and it contains information about the level, pattern, and sequence of government respect for these rights. No previous measure has explicitly addressed the issue of sequence of government respect for human rights. The sequence, or ordering, of respect for physical integrity rights that we find tells us which rights are more commonly respected (the rights not to be killed or disappeared) and which ones are more commonly violated (the rights not to be imprisoned arbitrarily or tortured). Our findings improve upon previous studies that have assumed unidimensionality and that have made a priori assertions of patterns of respect. They also stand in contrast to McCormick and Mitchell's (1997) claim that government respect for physical integrity rights is necessarily a multi-dimensional phenomenon.
We examine the relationship between the temporal and spatial aspects of democratic diffusion in the world system since 1946. We find strong and consistent evidence of temporal clustering of democratic and autocratic trends, as well as strong spatial association (or autocorrelation) of democratization. The analysis uses an exploratory data approach in a longitudinal framework to understand global and regional trends in changes in authority structures. Our work reveals discrete changes in regimes that run counter to the dominant aggregate trends of democratic waves or sequences, demonstrating how the ebb and flow of democracy varies among the world's regions. We conclude that further analysis of the process of regime change from autocracy to democracy, as well as reversals, should start from a “domain-specific” position that dis-aggregates the globe into its regional mosaics.
With the end of the Cold War economic issues moved to the fore of the international agenda. The integration of markets, dominated by multinational corporations and orchestrated by international financial institutions, has many concerned for the political and economic rights of the common citizen. This is a comprehensive cross-national study examining the effect of globalization on the attainment of the subgroup of human rights known as personal integrity rights. The impact of global economic patterns on the attainment of these rights is mixed.
This study examines the relationship between foreign economic capital and the level of government respect for two types of human rights in developing countries. Two opposing schools of thought offer explanations as to what this relationship might be like. According to the liberal neoclassical school, the acceptance of liberal economic doctrine will provide positive political benefits to developing countries. The “dependency” school, on the other hand, argues that because ties between core and periphery elites give governments in developing nations an incentive to repress, human rights conditions will worsen as foreign economic penetration increases. The results of previous empirical queries into this matter have been mixed. In contrast to most studies, we focus on a broader measure of foreign economic capital, including foreign direct investment, portfolio investment, debt, and official development assistance. Using ordered logit analysis on a cross-national sample of forty-three developing countries from 1981 to 1995, we discover systematic evidence of an association between foreign economic penetration and government respect for two types of human rights, physical integrity rights and political rights and civil liberties. Of particular interest is the finding that both foreign direct investment and portfolio investment are reliably associated with increased government respect for human rights.
Research on human rights consistently points to the importance of democracy in reducing the severity and incidence of personal integrity abuses. The prescriptive implications of this finding for policy makers interested in state building have been somewhat limited, however, by a reliance on multidimensional measures of democracy. Consequently, a policy maker emerges from this literature confident that “democracy matters” but unclear about which set(s) of reforms is likely to yield a greater human rights payoff. Using data from the Polity IV Project, we examine what aspects of democracy are most consequential in improving a state's human rights record. Analysis of democracy's dimensions elicits three findings. First, political participation at the level of multiparty competition appears more significant than other dimensions in reducing human rights abuses. Second, improvements in a state's level of democracy short of full democracy do not promote greater respect for integrity rights. Only those states with the highest levels of democracy, not simply those conventionally defined as democratic, are correlated with better human rights practices. Third, accountability appears to be the critical feature that makes full-fledged democracies respect human rights; limited accountability generally retards improvement in human rights.
Here we seek to build on our earlier research (Poe and Tate, 1994) by re-testing similar models on a data set covering a much longer time span; the period from 1976 to 1993. Several of our findings differ from those of our earlier work. Here we find statistical evidence that military regimes lead to somewhat greater human rights abuse, defined in terms of violations of personal integrity, once democracy and a host of other factors are controlled. Further, we find that countries that have experienced British colonial influence tend to have relatively fewer abuses of personal integrity rights than others. Finally, our results suggest that leftist countries are actually less repressive of these basic human rights than non-leftist countries. Consistent with the Poe and Tate (1994) study, however, we find that past levels of repression, democracy, population size, economic development, and international and civil wars exercise statistically significant and substantively important impacts on personal integrity abuse.
An implicit assumption of most policy analysts and some academics is that globalization leads to a convergence of traditionally national policies governing environmental regulation, consumer health and safety, the regulation of labor, and the ability to tax capital. Some claim that globalization leads to a race to the bottom, where concerns about the regulatory standards are sacrificed on the altar of commerce. Others argue that the growth of transnational governance structures leads to a negotiated convergence of ample regulation. This essay reviews the arguments and evidence for how globalization affects the convergence of regulatory policies, in particular the setting of labor and environmental standards. It argues that the theories of policy convergence, which rely on structural factors to induce policy convergence, are largely unsupported by the empirical evidence. Theories that grant agents autonomous decisionmaking power perform better but remain underspecified. Ironically, the realist paradigm, which has generally denigrated the globalization phenomenon, could prove a fruitful source for theories of improved policy convergence.
This paper introduces the subject of private politics, presents a research agenda, and provides an example involving activists and a firm. Private politics addresses situations of conflict and their resolution without reliance on the law or government. It encompasses the political competition over entitlements in the status quo, the direct competition for support from the public, bargaining over the resolution of the conflict, and the maintenance of the agreed-to private ordering. The term private means that the parties do not rely on public order, i.e., lawmaking or the courts. The term politics refers to individual and collective action in situations in which people attempt to further their interests by imposing their will on others. Four models of private politics are discussed: (1) informational competition between an activist and a firm for support from the public, (2) decisions by citizen consumers regarding a boycott, (3) bargaining to resolve the boycott, and (4) the choice of an equilibrium private ordering to govern the ongoing conflicting interests of the activist and the firm.
Presents a discussion of matching, randomization, random sampling, and other methods of controlling extraneous variation. The objective was to specify the benefits of randomization in estimating causal effects of treatments. It is concluded that randomization should be employed whenever possible but that the use of carefully controlled nonrandomized data to estimate causal effects is a reasonable and necessary procedure in many cases. (15 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).
Although published works rarely include causal estimates from more than a few model specifications, authors usually choose
the presented estimates from numerous trial runs readers never see. Given the often large variation in estimates across choices
of control variables, functional forms, and other modeling assumptions, how can researchers ensure that the few estimates
presented are accurate or representative? How do readers know that publications are not merely demonstrations that it is possible to find a specification that fits the author's favorite hypothesis? And how do we evaluate or even define statistical properties
like unbiasedness or mean squared error when no unique model or estimator even exists? Matching methods, which offer the promise
of causal inference with fewer assumptions, constitute one possible way forward, but crucial results in this fast-growing
methodological literature are often grossly misinterpreted. We explain how to avoid these misinterpretations and propose a
unified approach that makes it possible for researchers to preprocess data with matching (such as with the easy-to-use software
we offer) and then to apply the best parametric techniques they would have used anyway. This procedure makes parametric models
produce more accurate and considerably less model-dependent causal inferences.
This article addresses a puzzle: dictatorships that practice torture are more likely to accede to the UN Convention Against Torture (CAT) than dictatorships that do not practice torture. I argue the reason has to do with the logic of torture. Torture is more likely to occur where power is shared. In one-party or no-party dictatorships, few individuals defect against the regime. Consequently, less torture occurs. But dictatorships are protorture regimes; they have little interest in making gestures against torture, such as signing the CAT. There is more torture where power is shared, such as where dictatorships allow multiple political parties. Alternative political points of view are endorsed, but some individuals go too far. More acts of defection against the regime occur, and torture rates are higher. Because political parties exert some power, however, they pressure the regime to make concessions. One small concession is acceding to the CAT.
Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.
Human rights practices in Latin America provide a lens through whichto examine the relationship between international law and domesticpolitics. International human rights norms are expressed in numerouswidely ratified treaties. Many of those norms also are embedded incustomary international law. The number of binding human rights normsincorporated into international or regional law as well as the precisionand delegation of those norms increased significantly between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s. In addition, in the 1970s and 1980s aninternationalhuman rights advocacy network committed to documenting andspotlighting human rights violations,drafting and implementinginternationalhuman rights standards, and pressuring governments toimplement bilateral and multilateral human rights policies emerged.