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Get the word out: Monitoring human rights reduces abuse
Abstract
Does human rights advocacy make a difference? Many are skeptical. Studies often find that advocates have an impact only under limited circumstances. I argue that these underwhelming results are a by-product of an identification problem. Research so far has effectively focused on whether shaming campaigns reduce ongoing abuse. But such cases are only part of the story. Another big aspect of advocacy is preventing abuse from ever starting. We must then pay attention to the deterred, those who chose not to violate human rights because of the threat of shaming. These cases do not repress and are never shamed. They are easy to miss because they look the same as those who never considered abuse in the first place. However, identifying deterred cases is crucial for judging the effectiveness of advocacy. I argue that we can resolve this issue by focusing on the degree of human rights monitoring in a country. Doing so allows researchers to recognize those under the scrutiny of advocates, and hence those that could have been deterred even if they were never shamed. Once we do this analytical refocus it is easy to see the positive effect of human rights advocacy. Human rights monitoring reduces abuse, and it does so in most countries.
Thirty-five years after the Hungarian government ordered the removal of the barbed wire fence on the Western border, marking the beginning of the Eastern Bloc’s dismantling, the country has transformed from a stalwart of democracy to one of its opponents. One of the important signs of a failing democracy in contemporary Hungary has been the government’s emphatic rejection of the concept of gender, which includes further marginalizing sexual and gender minorities and a pattern of casting women in the role of mythical motherhood while systematically disregarding violence against both groups. This article analyzes how governmental complacency with discrimination and its persistent lack of concern regarding violence against women, queer, and trans people have been part of a broad ideological framework to pressure conformity to patriarchal control and exclusively heterosexual reproductive expectations.
This article offers a first subnational analysis of the relationship between states' dynamic control of Internet access and their use of violent repression. I argue that where governments provide Internet access, surveillance of digital information exchange can provide intelligence that enables the use of more targeted forms of repression, in particular in areas not fully controlled by the regime. Increasing restrictions on Internet accessibility can impede opposition organization, but they limit access to information on precise targets, resulting in an increase in untargeted repression. I present new data on killings in the Syrian conflict that distinguish between targeted and untargeted events, using supervised text classification. I find that higher levels of Internet accessibility are associated with increases in targeted repression, whereas areas with limited access experience more indiscriminate campaigns of violence. The results offer important implications on how governments incorporate the selective access to communication technology into their strategies of coercion.
Recent studies on global performance indicators (GPIs) reveal the distinct power that nonstate actors can accrue and exercise in world politics. How and when does this happen? Using a mixed-methods approach, we examine the impact of the Aid Transparency Index (ATI), an annual rating and rankings index produced by the small UK-based NGO Publish What You Fund. The ATI seeks to shape development aid donors' behavior with respect to their transparency—the quality and kind of information they publicly disclose. To investigate the ATI's effect, we construct an original panel data set of donor transparency performance before and after ATI inclusion (2006–2013) to test whether (and which) donors alter their behavior in response to inclusion in the ATI. To further probe the causal mechanisms that explain variations in donor behavior we use qualitative research, including over 150 key informant interviews conducted between 2010 and 2017. Our analysis uncovers the conditions under which the ATI influences powerful aid donors. Our mixed-methods evidence reveals how this happens. Consistent with Kelley and Simmons's central argument that GPIs exercise influence via social pressure, we find that the ATI shapes donor behavior primarily via direct effects on elites: the diffusion of professional norms, organizational learning, and peer pressure.
How do international norms affect respect for human rights? We report the results of an audit experiment with foreign missions that investigates the extent to which state agents observe international norms and react to the potential of international shaming. Our experiment involved emailing 669 foreign diplomatic missions in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom with requests to contact domestic prisoners. According to the United Nations, prisoners have the right for individuals to contact them. We randomly varied (1) whether we reminded embassies about the existence of an international norm permitting prisoner contact and (2) whether the putative email sender is associated with a fictitious human rights organization and, thereby, has the capacity to shame missions through naming and shaming for violating this norm. We find strong evidence for the positive effect of international norms on state respect for human rights. Contra to our expectations, though, we find that the potential of international shaming does not increase the probability of state compliance. The positive effect of the norms cue disappears when it is coupled with the shaming cue, suggesting that shaming might have a ‘backfire’ effect.
Under what conditions are foreign aid donors willing to suspend foreign aid to punish political transgressions, such as election fraud, corruption scandals or political repression? Prior scholarship has emphasized that political sanctions, including foreign aid suspensions, are constrained by the geostrategic considerations of donor countries. However, foreign aid suspensions often occur in strategically important countries, and donors respond differently to different types of political transgressions within the same county. To shed light on this puzzle, in this article, I present evidence from an original survey of top-level donor representatives in 20 African countries, including a list experiment designed to elicit truthful responses about the conditions under which donors are willing to suspend foreign aid. I argue that the likelihood of a foreign aid suspension depends not only on the strategic considerations of the donor government, but also on the institutional incentives of the donor agency. A donor agency's institutional incentives are shaped by the agency's organizational design, as well as by its foreign aid portfolio in the recipient country.
An independent press that is free from government censorship is regarded as
instrumental to ensuring human rights protection. Yet governments across the globe
oftentimes target journalists when their reports seem to offend them or contradict
their policies. Can the government’s infringements of the rights of journalists tell
us anything about its wider human rights agenda? The killing of a journalist is a
sign for deteriorating respect for human rights. If a government orders the killing
of a journalist, it is willing to use extreme measures to eliminate the threat posed
by the uncontrolled flow of information. If non-state actors murder journalists, it
reflects insecurity, which can lead to a backlash by the government, again triggering
state-sponsored repression. To test the argument whether the killing of journalists is
a precursor to increasing repression, we introduce a new global dataset on killings
of journalists between 2002 and 2013, which uses three different sources that track
such events across the world. The new data show that mostly local journalists are
targeted and that in most cases the perpetrators remain unconfirmed. Particularly in
countries with limited repression, human rights conditions are likely to deteriorate
in the two years following the killing of a journalist. When journalists are killed,
human rights conditions are unlikely to improve where standard models of human
rights would expect an improvement. Our research underlines the importance of
taking the treatment of journalists seriously, not only because it endangers their lives
and limits our understanding of events on the ground, but because their physical
safety is an important precursor of more repression in the future.
Does the “shaming” of human rights violations influence foreign aid delivery decisions across OECD donor countries? We examine the effect of shaming, defined as targeted negative attention by human rights international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), on donor decisions about how to deliver bilateral aid. We argue that INGO shaming of recipient countries leads donor governments, on average, to “bypass” the recipient government in favor of non-state aid delivery channels, including international and local NGOs and international organizations (IOs). However, we expect this relationship to be conditional on a donor country’s position in the international system. Minor power countries have limited influence in global affairs and are therefore more able to centrally promote human rights in their foreign policy. Major power countries, on the other hand, shape world politics and often confront “realpolitik” concerns that may require government-to-government aid relations in the presence of INGO shaming. We thus expect aid officials of minor donor countries to be more likely to condition aid delivery decisions on human rights shaming than their counterparts of major donor countries. Using compositional data analysis, we test our argument using originally collected data on human rights shaming events and an originally constructed measure of bilateral aid delivery in a time-series cross-sectional framework from 2004 to 2010. We find support for our hypotheses: On average, OECD donor governments increase the proportion of bypass when INGOs shame the recipient government. When differentiating between donor types we find that this finding holds for minor but not for major powers. These results add to both our understanding of the influences of aid allocation decision-making and our understanding of the role of INGOs on foreign-policy.
In the last few decades, Western governments have spent huge sums of money to promote democracy abroad. We do not know which, if any, of these programs actually work. If we cannot measure democracy in sufficient detail and with the necessary nuance, we cannot mark its progress and setbacks or affect its future course. While distinguishing the most democratic countries from the least democratic ones is fairly easy, it has proven to be much harder to make finer distinctions. Here we present a new effort aimed at measuring democracy, the Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem).
The empirical question of how often deterrent threats issued during international disputes succeed has been hotly debated for years, with some researchers arguing that virtually no robust cases of success can be identified. I argue that what appears to be an empirical and methodological debate actually arises from the inadequacy of classical rational deterrence theory, which fails to comprehend the implications of states' strategic self-selection into international disputes. Rational self-selection is shown to imply that in a sample of crises, deterrent threats issued after an initial challenge will tend to fail in precisely those cases where they are relatively most credible signals of an intent to resist with force. The product of a selection effect, this paradoxical implication allows a resolution of the debate on the efficacy of deterrence in crises. And because selection effects can arise whenever a historical "case" is the product of choices by actors who also influence the outcome in question, this example from the study of deterrence has broad relevance for empirical research.
The severity of abuse may be be less important than a nation's policy relevance to the West, the ability of journalists to investigate freely, and attention from rights activists.
International organizations like Human Rights Watch are legitimately
urged to pay more attention to economic, social and cultural rights. But
practical prescriptions are often simplistic—typically involving only
the rhetorical invocation of these rights. The strength of organizations
like Human Rights Watch is not their rhetorical voice but their shaming
methodology—their ability to investigate misconduct and expose it to
public opprobrium. That methodology is most effective when there is
relative clarity about violation, violator, and remedy. That clarity
is best achieved when misconduct can be portrayed as arbitrary or
discriminatory rather than a matter of purely distributive justice.
Using an event history framework we analyze the adoption rate of national human rights institutions. Neo-realist perspective
predicts adoption rates to be positively influenced by favorable national profiles that lower the costs and make it more reasonable
to establish these institutions. From a world polity perspective adoption rates will be positively influenced by a world saturated
with human rights organizations and conferences, by increasing adoption densities, and by greater linkages to the world polity.
We find support for both perspectives in the analysis of the human rights commission. Only the changing state of the world
polity is consequential for the founding of the classical ombudsman office. We discuss the national incorporation of international
human rights standards and its relevance to issues of state sovereignty and national citizenship.
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.
What shapes the transnational activist agenda? Do non-governmental organizations with a global mandate focus on the world's most pressing problems, or is their reporting also affected by additional considerations? To address these questions, we study the determinants of country reporting by an exemplary transnational actor, Amnesty International, during 1986–2000. We find that while human rights conditions are associated with the volume of their country reporting, other factors also matter, including previous reporting efforts, state power, U.S. military assistance, and a country's media profile. Drawing on interviews with Amnesty and Human Rights Watch staff, we interpret our findings as evidence of Amnesty International's social movement-style “information politics.” The group produces more written work on some countries than others to maximize advocacy opportunities, shape international standards, promote greater awareness, and raise its profile. This approach has both strengths and weaknesses, which we consider after extending our analysis to other transnational sectors.
Tactical repertoires of mobilization and repression play an essential role in understanding dynamics of political violence, yet existing quantitative approaches focus primarily on intensities or counts of repressive actions. We focus instead on the diversity of repression, and demonstrate a novel method of measuring repertoires of state repression using event data. We show that more repressive states are likely to employ more diverse repertoires of repression, rather than specializing narrowly in particularly coercive tactics. We demonstrate that, globally, repertoires of state repression are growing less diverse over time. Finally, in the Online appendix, we model repertoires of repression across countries and over time, finding evidence of broader repertoires during protest and civil war, but narrower under democratic regimes and international human rights treaties.
The most prominent approach to promoting human rights features the naming and shaming of perpetrators of abuses and those who abet them, including the tactic of ranking non-compliant states relative to their peers to undermine their international status. Neither activists nor the scholars who study them have paid much attention to the emotional dynamics of the targeted group, and in particular to the emotions of shame and shaming, nor to the sociological mechanisms that underpin the politics of status and status competition. This article draws upon relatively ignored, yet mainstream theoretical literatures in psychology, social psychology, and sociology in arguing that naming and shaming tactics often lead to backlash by those who are targeted. Transnational human rights advocacy commonly appeals to the norms of exporting society. On the recipient side, this external outrage plays into the hands of elites in a traditional power structure, drawing energy from outrage at loss of status in a way that motivates widespread popular backlash. The backlash narrative alters public discourse, reinvigorates and reshapes traditional institutions, and in these ways locks in and perpetuates patterns that leave the progressive namers and shamers farther from their goals. Beyond arguing that this is a common pattern, I will also investigate the conditions and tactics that are less likely to spur counterproductive backlash.
Can the creation of court-mandated accountability institutions improve human rights? In this article, we investigate the extent to which court-ordered accountability institutions decrease government repression in the form of police violence. We argue that the creation of regional bodies to which citizens report allegations of police abuse provides “fire-alarm” oversight by which police officers can be monitored for abuses of power. To test the implications of our theory, we take advantage of variance in the implementation of Prakash Singh and Others v. Union of India and Others, a 2006 judgment by the Supreme Court of India requiring states and districts to establish local Police Complaints Authorities (PCAs). Using a difference-in-difference design, we show the implementation of state PCAs to be associated with statistically and substantively significant decreases in human rights violations by Indian police officers.
Precise international metrics and assessments may induce governments to alter policies in pursuit of more favorable assessments according to these metrics. In this paper, we explore a secondary effect of global performance indicators (GPIs). Insofar as governments have finite resources and make trade-offs in public goods investments, a GPI that precisely targets the provision of a particular public good may cause governments to substitute away from the provision of other, related, public goods. We argue that both the main effect of the GPI (on the measured public good) and this substitution effect vary systematically based on the domestic political institutions and informational environments of targeted states. Specifically, we contend that both the main and substitution effects of GPIs should be largest for governments that are least accountable (opaque and nondemocratic) and should be smallest for those that are most accountable. We illustrate the logic of these arguments using a formal model and test these claims using data on primary and secondary enrollment rates across 114 countries. We find that countries substitute toward primary education enrollment rates (which is targeted by the Millennium Development Goals) and away from secondary (which is not), and that these effects are mitigated as accountability rises.
How does international pressure for economic liberalization affect repression in autocracies? I argue that demands for deregulation create a “compensation dynamic” that can lead to repression. Autocrats can liberalize to build goodwill with the international community, but liberalization also threatens the interests of domestic autocratic elites. Liberalization undercuts the networks of patronage and clientelism that empower elites. Thus, liberalizing the economy could weaken political insiders, potentially destabilizing the regime coalition. Insider elites look to counteract this threat by demanding that autocratic rulers commit to protecting the status quo. Dictators are likely to accede and increase repression to placate allies and avoid a potential coup. Crucially, this compensation dynamic only occurs when dictators see rebellion as a potential danger to their tenure. When elites are unable to coordinate a credible threat, dictators can heed international interests without having to compensate regime insiders. In contrast, statistical analyses of a global sample of autocracies show that economic liberalization is associated with repression when elites are strong enough to check dictators’ power.
The number of rights organizations worldwide has grown exponentially, as the term “human rights” becomes increasingly common among politicians and civil society activists. As international donors pour money into global human rights promotion, many governments-as well as scores of scholars and activists-fear a subtle, Western-led campaign for political, economic, and cultural domination. This book asks: What do publics in the global South think? Drawing on surveys in India, Mexico, Morocco, and Nigeria, the book finds most people are in fact broadly supportive of human rights discourse, trust local, rights-promoting organizations, and do not view human rights as a tool of foreign powers. Pro-human rights constituencies, rather, tend to be highly skeptical of the U.S. government, of multinational corporations, and of their own governments. However, this generalized public support for the human rights “brand” is not grounded in strong commitments of public effort or money, or in dense social ties to the nongovernmental rights sector. Publics in the global South rarely give to their local rights groups, and few local rights organizations attempt to raise funds apart from foreign aid. This strategy is becoming increasingly untenable as governments crack down on foreign aid to civil society. The book also analyzes the complex relationships between religion and human rights, finding that public or social elements of religiosity are often associated with less support for human rights organizations. Personal religiosity, on the other hand, is often associated with more human rights support.
Why do intergovernmental organizations target some countries, but not others, for naming and shaming? We seek answers by examining these processes within the International Labour Organization (ILO), which through two principal bodies, monitors compliance with international conventions governing the rights of workers. We examine whether political interests and calculations or norms inducing adherence to international conventions best explain which countries the ILO calls out for their misconduct, what punishment countries receive, and whether naming and shaming in the ILO amount to distinctive activities. Based on an analysis of the 1989–2011 period, we find considerable evidence that norms matter to members of both ILO bodies. That is, we find evidence that the ILO “does its job” by acting in accordance with the organization's formal mandate. We also find evidence that the process of naming, which leads to the initial identification of culprits, stands apart from the process by which the ILO prioritizes, or chooses, from among countries for shaming. While our findings are specific to the ILO, they back claims that IOs can override states interests, if crafted in ways that limit political influence.
In the aftermath of recent popular uprisings in dictatorships, many observers argued that information and communication technologies, notably the Internet, played a key role in the mobilization of political protest. This book unpacks when and under which circumstances Internet technology can benefit opposition activists aiming to mobilize protests, and when the technology plays into the hands of autocratic governments. Since autocratic governments enjoy a high degree of control over the introduction and expansion of Internet technology and over digital communication ows, the book argues that it should help them keep levels of protest low in the long-term. However, once protest has started, short-term government intervention becomes more difficult, which is why Internet technology can catalyze ongoing episodes of unrest. The book presents detailed empirical analyses of the relationship between the use of Internet technology and protest in autocracies. By leveraging new sub-national data on political protest and Internet penetration, these analysis cover more than sixty autocratic countries at the level of cities. The results show that higher levels of Internet penetration in cities reduce the overall occurrence of protest in dictatorships, but once protest has started, the Internet contributes to the continuation of protest in the same city as well as its diffusion to other locations. By examining the use of the Internet by governments in relation to other means of autocratic repression, the book also demonstrates the technological modernization of autocratic politics, where digital repression via the Internet partly substitutes traditional forms of political control.
What are the limits of democracy’s positive influence on human rights? In this article, we argue that contested elections and powerful courts provide leaders with different incentives with regard to hiding torture. Because government torture is generally targeted at individuals that voters find threatening, institutions that reflect public opinion – like electoral contestation – are associated with higher levels of government abuse that leave scars on the victim’s body. Other institutions – like powerful courts – protect the rights of political minorities. Leaders in countries with powerful courts prefer plausible deniability of rights violations and consequently employ higher levels of clean torture, which leaves no scars. We test our hypotheses using data from the Ill-Treatment and Torture (ITT) Data Collection Project that distinguish between Amnesty International (AI) allegations of scarring and clean torture. We employ an undercount negative binomial that accounts for AI’s (in)ability to obtain information about torture. The model assumes that some incidents of torture go unreported and allows the extent of underreporting to vary across countries/years. Estimates from the model yield considerable statistical and substantive support for our hypotheses.
Human rights monitoring reports play important roles both in the international human rights regime and in productions of human rights data. However, human rights reports are produced by organizations subject to formal and informal pressures that may influence the topics considered salient for attention and scrutiny. We study this potential using structural topic models (STMs), a method used for identifying the latent topical dimensions of texts and assessing the effects of covariates on these dimensions. We apply STMs to a corpus of 6298 State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices (1977–2012), identifying a plausible set of topics including killings and disappearances, freedoms of expression and movement, and labor rights, among others. We find that these topics vary markedly both over time and space. We also find that while US domestic politics play no systematic role in shaping topic prevalence, US allies tend to receive more attention to violations of physical integrity rights. These results challenge extant research, and illustrate the usefulness of STM methods for future study of foreign policy documents. Our findings also highlight the importance of topical attention shifts in documents that monitor and evaluate countries.
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.
The Ill-Treatment and Torture (ITT) Data Collection Project uses content analysis to measure a number of variables on more than 15,000 public allegations of government ill-treatment and torture made by Amnesty International (AI) from 1995 to 2005. The ITT specific allegation (SA) event data use the torture allegation as the unit of observation, thus permitting users to manipulate them for a wide variety of purposes. In this article, we introduce the ITT SA data. We first describe the key variables in the SA data and report a number of bivariate descriptive statistics to illustrate some of the research questions that might be usefully investigated with the data. We then discuss how we believe the ITT SA data can be used to study not only AI's naming and shaming behavior, but also states' (lack of) compliance with the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT). We conclude with an empirical analysis using the SA data that investigates the effect of domestic political institutions on formal complaints, investigations, and adjudication of torture allegations. We show that legislative checks are positively associated with complaints, investigations, and trials; elections and freedom of speech are positively associated with investigations and trials; and powerful judiciaries are associated only with investigations.
Over time human rights have gained prominence in international organizations. At the same time, dealing with them has proved difficult and contentious. The present article focuses on the way in which the United Nations have addressed human rights issues, especially through the Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) and its successor the Human Rights Council (UNHRC). Drawing on data on resolutions debated and (largely) adopted in these two bodies in the last 17 years, I offer a comparison of the voting record in these two periods. By analyzing in detail in a comparative fashion the votes in these two bodies, the article shows that despite the high hopes, the UNHRC faces some of the same challenges as its predecessor. More specifcally, I find that the conflict lines have largely remained the same in these two bodies, and the degree of polarization has slightly increased in the new UNHRC.
The United Nations Human Rights Council was created in 2006 to replace the UN Commission on Human Rights. The Council's mandate and founding principles demonstrate that one of the main aims, at its creation, was for the Council to overcome the Commission's flaws. Despite the need to avoid repeating its predecessor's failings, the Council's form, nature and many of its roles and functions are strikingly similar to those of the Commission. This book examines the creation and formative years of the United Nations Human Rights Council and assesses the extent to which the Council has fulfilled its mandate. International law and theories of international relations are used to examine the Council and its functions. Council sessions, procedures and mechanisms are analysed in-depth, with particular consideration given to whether the Council has become politicised to the same extent as the Commission. Whilst remaining aware of the key differences in their functions, Rosa Freedman compares the work of the Council to that of treaty-based human rights bodies. The author draws on observations from her attendance at Council proceedings in order to offer a unique account of how the body works in practice. The United Nations Human Rights Council will be of great interest to students and scholars of human rights law and international relations, as well as lawyers, NGOs and relevant government agencies.
In many respects political scientists agree about how best to model political processes. But we disagree about how to translate our theories into structural equations; each of us seems to have our own structural equation model of the same theory. This disagreement is a serious impediment to theory building. Vector autoregression (VAR) is a means of circumventing this problem. We explain the logic of this alternative modeling strategy and examine its relative virtues. In particular, VAR and the more familiar structural equation (SEQ) approaches are compared in terms of their epistemological underpinnings, empirical power, and usefulness in policy analysis. This comparison shows that the two modeling strategies are based on different conceptions of theory and of theory building and that, for the four--six variable systems we usually study, the choice between VAR and SEQ models presents a trade-off between accuracy of causal inference and quantitative precision, respectively. In addition, VAR models have the disadvantage of being unable to incorporate multiplicative and nonlinear relationships as easily as SEQ models. But VAR models have the advantage of providing a more complete treatment of policy endogeneity than SEQ models. These and other contrasts in the two modeling strategies are illustrated in a reanalysis of Alt and Chrystal's (1983) permanent income model of government expenditure.
The empirical literature that examines cross-national patterns of state repression seeks to discover a set of political, economic, and social conditions that are consistently associated with government violations of human rights. Null hypothesis significance testing is the most common way of examining the relationship between repression and concepts of interest, but we argue that it is inadequate for this goal, and has produced potentially misleading results. To remedy this deficiency in the literature we use cross-validation and random forests to determine the predictive power of measures of concepts the literature identifies as important causes of repression. We find that few of these measures are able to substantially improve the predictive power of statistical models of repression. Further, the most studied concept in the literature, democratic political institutions, predicts certain kinds of repression much more accurately than others. We argue that this is due to conceptual and operational overlap between democracy and certain kinds of state repression. Finally, we argue that the impressive performance of certain features of domestic legal systems, as well as some economic and demographic factors, justifies a stronger focus on these concepts in future studies of repression.
Although the United Nations Commission on Human Rights served as the primary forum in which governments publicly named and shamed others for abusing their citizens, the practices of the commission have been largely ignored by political scientists. To address that deficiency, this study analyzes the actions of the commission and its members' voting records in the 1977–2001 period. It establishes that targeting and punishment by the commission decreasingly fit the predictions of a realist perspective, in which naming and shaming is an inherently political exercise, and increasingly fit the predictions of a liberal “reputation” perspective, in which governments hold others to their promises, and a constructivist “social conformity” perspective, in which governments distribute and respond to social rewards and punishments. With the end of the Cold War, the commission's targeting and punishment of countries was based less on partisan ties, power politics, and the privileges of membership, and more on those countries' actual human rights violations, treaty commitments, and active participation in cooperative endeavors such as peacekeeping operations.
The ability to monitor state behavior has become a critical tool of international governance. Systematic monitoring allows for the creation of numerical indicators that can be used to rank, compare, and essentially censure states. This article argues that the ability to disseminate such numerical indicators widely and instantly constitutes an exercise of social power, with the potential to change important policy outputs. It explores this argument in the context of the United States’ efforts to combat trafficking in persons and find evidence that monitoring has important effects: Countries are more likely to criminalize human trafficking when they are included in the U.S. annual Trafficking in Persons Report, and countries that are placed on a “watch list” are also more likely to criminalize. These findings have broad implications for international governance and the exercise of soft power in the global information age.
Does naming and shaming states affect respect for human rights in those states? This article argues that incentives to change repressive behaviour when facing international condemnation vary across regime types. In democracies and hybrid regimes – which combine democratic and authoritarian elements – opposition parties and relatively free presses paradoxically make rulers less likely to change behaviour when facing international criticism. In contrast, autocracies, which lack these domestic sources of information on abuses, are more sensitive to international shaming. Using data on naming and shaming taken from Western press reports and Amnesty International, the authors demonstrate that naming and shaming is associated with improved human rights outcomes in autocracies, but with either no effect or a worsening of outcomes in democracies and hybrid regimes.
Given the myriad of human rights abuses that occur globally and daily, why are some nations on the receiving end of a substantial amount of international opprobrium, while others receive far less attention and condemnation? The authors contend that the increasing presence of human rights organizations in such states is the critical link between the local and the international. Increases in the number of such groups contributes significantly to the generation of Amnesty International urgent actions, one of the most-often-utilized tools in naming and shaming campaigns against human rights abusing regimes. The authors find strong support for nearly all their hypotheses.
In this paper we use the concept of a global Panopticon to interpret the promotion and protection of Western-informed human rights. We use the Panopticon as a metaphor to illustrate how a system of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) can work in concert with hegemonic states to decrease future occurrences of serious human rights abuses. Like previous authors who use the concept of the Panopticon in this context, we see the current global human rights regime connected to, and benefiting, current hegemonic power structures. But unlike previous authors we find normative benefits to this Panoptic surveillance, even if such benefits result, and thus cannot be separated from, the power structures in which they develop. We consider why hegemons would promote the activity of NGOs when the latter are often critical of the former's foreign policy practices. We then look at two humanitarian crises as case studies to determine the role NGOs played in their outcomes.
The methodological issues that arise in testing Fearon's argument about domestic political audience costs and signaling in international crises are examined, in particular the difficulty of finding direct evidence (1) that escalating a crisis and then backing down jeopardizes a leader's tenure in office, and (2) that democratic leaders are more vulnerable to removal in this event than are nondemocratic leaders. Tests that seek to measure the existence and magnitude of audience costs encounter severe problems of partial observability and strategic selection: the effect of audience costs on a leader's political survival can only be detected by looking at cases in which the costs are actually incurred, but strategic choice implies that the probability of incurring audience costs is a function of their value. A formal model, brief case studies, and Monte Carlo simulations are used to show that these problems bias direct tests against supporting either of the audience cost propositions. Tests based on observed audience costs understate both the mean level of audience costs in the full population and the difference in means across regime types.
Are violators of international human rights norms punished with lower levels of foreign aid? Despite their abstract preferences, governments often lack the incentive to punish norm violators bilaterally. Multilateral lending institutions, such as the World Bank, could fill the void if they wanted to consider human rights abuses and could bypass restrictions on evaluating the political character of recipients. This article argues that `shaming' in the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, through resolutions that explicitly criticized governments for their human rights records, provided substantive information about rights abuses and gave political cover for the World Bank and other liberal multilateral aid institutions seeking to sanction human rights violators. Statistical analyses support these theoretical claims. The adoption of a UNCHR resolution condemning a country's human rights record produced a sizeable reduction in multilateral, and especially World Bank, aid but had no effect on the country's aggregate bilateral aid receipts. The analyses also support predictions that `objective' measures of human rights have no independent effect on multilateral aid allocations. The findings, which are robust to different model techniques and specifications, suggest that punishment for violating international human rights norms is selective, that international organizations play an important role in the selection process and, thus, that seemingly symbolic resolutions of a politically motivated IO can carry tangible consequences.
Three critical issues involved in quantitative analysis of deterrence are addressed: the criteria for identifying deterrence cases, the problem of selection bias, and understanding the nature of deterrence outcomes. The criteria for establishing the presence of immediate deterrent threats are refined to allow for a more robust selection of cases, and deterrence outcomes are revised to include compromise as a midpoint between success and failure. A new data set of extended-immediate deterrence for the 1895-1985 period is presented and compared to previous data sets. Hypotheses about the effects of relative power and alliances on deterrence outcomes are developed to rectify the problem of selection bias due to unobservable prior beliefs. Alliances are shown to be a more reliable predictor of behavior than previously assumed. The results support theoretical expectations about the consequences of selection bias that more powerful states are less likely to acquiesce. The inclusion of compromise proves significant because only this outcome is strongly associated with the balance of power.
Human Rights Quarterly 23.3 (2001) 583-624
In an era of globalization, universal human rights are judged to transcend state borders and fragment state sovereignty. International human rights treaties and multilateral human rights organizations play an increasing role in regulating state activity and exert a socializing impact on recalcitrant states. Recent research suggests that bilateral pressures are low on the scale of effectiveness in comparison to multilateral pressures. Despite this, individual states continue to assume an ongoing role in monitoring each other's human rights performance. Far from diminishing, the regulatory burden of the state appears to be expanding, as the monitoring of China's human rights by the international community is diverted, at China's urging, into an increasing number of bilateral channels. Despite US extension of Permanent Normal Training Relations (PNTR) to China in 2000, and despite the newfound scepticism of European Union (EU) states, China is insisting on the efficacy of the bilateral mechanism of its human rights dialogue with the United States (US) and many other Western states, in preference to the potentially humiliating experience of a resolution critical of China in the UN Human Rights Commission.
This dialogue experience, described by China as turning "confrontation" into "cooperation," is an essentially nonintrusive exercise which eschews resort to bargaining, shaming, sanctions, and even to publicity. However, as the Chinese description makes clear, its effects are palpable -- they provide, quite simply, an alternative model for monitoring any state's human rights, which is, moreover, determined by the target state. The shape of things to come is suggested by the recent diminution of the monitoring role of the UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights (or Human Rights Sub-Commission), and the alteration in the monitoring procedures of the UN Human Rights Commission. It is even more strongly suggested by the shock development of 3 May 2001 when the US, the strongest champion of international human rights, failed to retain its seat on the UN Human Rights Commission and was replaced by other European states. The question must therefore be rigorously examined: if bilateral monitoring is to become the preferred model for dealing with offending states, how effective has it been in relation to China, whether in its earlier active mode of US monitoring through the Most Favored Nation (MFN) trading status mechanism, or in its present manifestation of bilateral human rights dialogues with many Western states?
Bilateral monitoring of human rights differs from multilateral monitoring in that it begins as a unilateral initiative which, although it may be accepted in part by the target state, is not based on any formal agreement or on any mutually agreed standard. It is ad hoc, undefined and informal and therefore lacks the collective, consensual, historical, and institutionally based moral authority of multilateral mechanisms. It imposes different constraints on the behavior of target states, being more dependent for its impact either on the superior power and economic sanctions wielded by the monitoring power or on the quality of the role model. On the other hand, it is more easily imposed, less vulnerable to collective opposition, and more accessible to nongovernmental (NGO) pressure. Since it is not fixed in standard, or institutionalized, it is also open to more creative treatment.
There are two main types of bilateral monitoring: large power monitoring by the US, which is more likely to involve unilateral sanctions, and the "other" monitoring procedures of middle and small Western powers. The differences are articulated primarily in terms of strategic status and political culture. The US political system is seen by Jan Egeland to have a results-oriented, short-term, and media-dominated perspective which is less conducive to long-term results than the more stable and pragmatic Northern European tradition, in which the diplomatic bureaucratic establishment designs long-term human rights policies. Jack Donnelly compares the consensus characteristic of the Nordic parliamentary system, in which there is no sharp division between executive and legislative branches and a strong reliance on a professional foreign and civil service, with the lack of consensus in the US presidential system, which is marked by a division between executive and legislative branches and the turnover of leadership in...
Human Rights Quarterly 23.3 (2001) 650-677
The US State Department's annual publication, the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, has been a continuing source of controversy since it was first issued in the mid-1970s. These reports, which assess the degree to which human rights standards are respected in countries around the world, have been examined carefully by policymakers and academics alike. Particularly in the 1980s, critics frequently charged the State Department with biased reporting. The State Department has been accused of unfairly painting with the tar of repression countries ideologically opposed to the United States, while unjustly favoring countries where the US has had a compelling interest.
Commentary on the Country Reports has not all been negative, however. Interviews conducted by Innes and the results of careful, critical examinations over the years (e.g., Lawyers Committee for Human Rights Reports for 1982, 1984, 1987, 1991, 1993, 1995, 1996), tend to agree that the annual State Department Reports are an invaluable resource that accurately reports on the conditions of most of the countries most of the time. Though critical of reports on particular countries, they also have suggested that the reports have substantially improved over the years.
In this study we present the results of our systematic, quantitative examination of the State Department Reports (1977-1996), comparing them with the reports issued by Amnesty International (1977-1996) , to find if existing evidence is consistent with allegations of bias. In conducting this examination we will fill a lacuna in the fast-developing quantitative research on human rights for in spite of the great public and scholarly scrutiny of these allegations, no statistical investigation of them has ever been conducted. We will also examine the historical record to find if evidence does indeed indicate that the reports have improved over time.
Since the mid-1980s researchers have increasingly turned their attention to human rights issues. Most of the quantitative research conducted under the human rights rubric thus far has investigated violations that pertain to personal (or physical) integrity: the right not to be imprisoned, tortured, disappeared, or executed, either arbitrarily or for one's political views. One vein of human rights research has attempted to isolate the impact of human rights considerations on foreign policy outputs, such as foreign aid and immigration policies of the United States government. Another fast-growing line of research seeks a theoretical understanding of why these human rights are violated. Beginning in the 1970s, numerous empirical studies addressed the problem of explaining cross-national variations in the respect for personal integrity rights. In the last two decades, many studies from both of these veins have been based on statistical analysis conducted either wholly or in part with data gathered from the U.S. State Department's Country Reports. Given the large and growing amount of empirical research based on these reports and those of Amnesty International, a systematic comparison of the two is long overdue.
This study should also be of interest to international relations and foreign policy scholars with a more general orientation. Statements of policymakers made in the introduction of the Country Reports (e.g., 1982) and statements by political appointees suggest that particular presidents' ideological orientations are reflected in the reports. Still, the career officers who are often responsible for compiling the Country Reports may not always be malleable to presidential preferences. Our analysis will also provide a means of assessing whether presidents have successfully reached through the layers of bureaucracy to affect the State Department's evaluations of human rights. And they will also provide us with some indication of whether the reports may have changed in reaction to the breakdown of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, events that have been shown to have changed other aspects of American foreign policy.
Finally, it should be noted that this inquiry is important to practical politics. The Country Reports, along with Amnesty International's annual reports, are the two most widely distributed and read sources of information on countries' human rights practices. Certainly credible allegations of bias have been around for a long time, but as yet...
Since general deterrence necessarily precedes immediate deterrence, the analysis of general deterrence is more fundamental to an understanding of international conflict than is an analysis of immediate deterrence. Nonetheless, despite a few exceptions, the quantitative literature has ignored the subject of general deterrence, focusing almost exclusively on situations of immediate deterrence. My purpose in this essay is to fill this evidentiary gap by subjecting a recently developed theory of general deterrence—Perfect Deterrence Theory—to a systematic test by examining general deterrence from 1816–2000. The results indicate that the predictions of perfect deterrence theory are strongly supported by the empirical record.
Do the “shaming” activities of HROs (human rights international non-governmental organizations) have a direct influence on state behavior? We argue, consistent with existing scholarship, that states targeted or “shamed” by these organizations do improve their human rights practices. However, mere shaming is not enough. Improvements in human rights practices result from the interaction of shaming by HROs with (i) a domestic presence of HROs within the targeted state and/or (ii) pressure by third-party states, individuals, and organizations. Using a new data set of the shaming events of more than 400 HROs toward governments, we test these propositions quantitatively and find widespread support for the arguments. This research provides the first global quantitative evidence of the conditional importance of HRO shaming in transnational advocacy efforts.
It is widely recognized that many of the samples we use for statistical analysis in international politics are the result of some selection process. Not surprisingly, se-lection models are becoming increasingly popular. At the same time, the role of strategic interaction has begun to play a more important role in statistical analyses. However, it has not been clear how statistical strategic models and selection models relate to each other, or what the effects are of employing one when the other is the more appropriate model. In this article, I 1) clarify why international relations scholars cannot shield themselves from selection bias simply by assuming their results are limited to a given sample; 2) show how recent statistical strategic models relate to traditional selection models and generalize the two sets of models by deriving a correlated strategic model; and 3) examine the effects of misspecifying either corre-lated errors or strategic interaction. My results indicate that failure to model the strategic interaction produces worse specification error than failure to account for correlated disturbances. In fact, traditional bivariate probit models appear to be su-perior only when states are almost completely uncertain about each others' prefer-ences.
Recent literature argues that economic sanction threats should be more successful because both sender and target have an incentive to resolve their dispute before entering into costly sanction. Testing this assertion is somewhat problematic because threats are essentially nonevents—sanctions that were never deployed. This paper quantifies the U.S. threats to condition or revoke China's most favored nation status and shows that Washington's threats were not only ineffective but also counterproductive—Chinese accommodations decreased when the U.S. made acute threats but increased when Washington was cooperative. We conclude that for highly salient issues, sanction threats tend to be ineffective.
The most commonly used weapon in the arsenal of human rights proponents is shaming the violating government through public criticism. But does this really affect the behavior of the violator? This study examines how governments that are targeted for human rights criticism respond to subsequent contentious challenges. Analyzing 873 challenges in seven Latin American countries between 1981 and 1995, it is found that human rights criticism does lead governments to reduce repression of subsequent challenges in cases where there are relatively strong economic ties to other countries. However, the duration of this impact is relatively short—less than 6 months. Examination of the source of human rights criticism shows that criticism by NGOs, religious groups, and foreign governments was more effective than criticism from inter-governmental organizations.