Suchergebnisse

Although they are arguably the worst violators of human rights, dictators sometimes commit to international human rights treaties like the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT) to appease their domestic opposition. Importantly, however, executives facing effective judiciaries must anticipate ex post costs that can arise when international treaties are likely to be enforced domestically. This suggests that one domestic institution-a political opposition party-may provide a dictator with incentives to commit to international human rights treaties and violate human rights, while another-an effective domestic judiciary-may constrain the dictator's ability to violate human rights and incentivize him to avoid international commitment. How do dictators make choices about commitment to human rights law and respect for human rights when they face conflicting domestic incentives? Furthermore, how do these divergent incentives affect compliance when dictators do commit to international treaties? In this article, I argue that the domestic incentives dictators face to support the CAT and engage in torture are moderated in countries with effective domestic judiciaries. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

Although they are arguably the worst violators of human rights, dictators sometimes commit to international human rights treaties like the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT) to appease their domestic opposition. Importantly, however, executives facing effective judiciaries must anticipate ex post costs that can arise when international treaties are likely to be enforced domestically. This suggests that one domestic institution—a political opposition party—may provide a dictator with incentives to commit to international human rights treaties and violate human rights, while another—an effective domestic judiciary—may constrain the dictator's ability to violate human rights and incentivize him to avoid international commitment. How do dictators make choices about commitment to human rights law and respect for human rights when they face conflicting domestic incentives? Furthermore, how do these divergent incentives affect compliance when dictators do commit to international treaties? In this article, I argue that the domestic incentives dictators face to support the CAT and engage in torture are moderated in countries with effective domestic judiciaries.

AbstractCan 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.

Do international human rights treaties constrain governments from repressing their populations? Government authorities routinely ignore their international obligations, and countries with poor human rights records join international treaties and yet continue to violate rights. Contentious Compliance presents a new theory of treaty effects founded on the idea that governments repress as part of a domestic conflict with potential or actual dissidents.

Do international human rights treaties constrain governments from repressing their populations and violating rights? In Contentious Compliance, Courtenay R. Conrad and Emily Hencken Ritter present a new theory of human rights treaty effects founded on the idea that governments repress as part of a domestic conflict with potential or actual dissidents. By introducing dissent like peaceful protests, strikes, boycotts, or direct violent attacks on government, their theory improves understanding of when states will violate rights-and when international laws will work to protect people. Conrad and Ritter investigate the effect of international human rights treaties on domestic conflict and ultimately find that treaties improve human rights outcomes by altering the structure of conflict between political authorities and potential dissidents. A powerful, careful, and empirically sophisticated rejoinder to the critics of international human rights law, Contentious Compliance offers new insights and analyses that will reshape our thinking on law and political violence.

In this analytical essay, we advance a simple but powerful claim: scholars can better understand outcomes of international organizations (IOs) by developing theories that explicitly make assumptions about legislative process. Because process assumptions powerfully explain domestic legislative outcomes and many international assemblies demonstrate similarities to domestic legislatures, scholars could usefully employ legislative-process-centric approaches when theorizing about outcomes in world politics. Following an explication of why scholars might focus on legislative procedure, we describe several legislative procedures and highlight variance across those procedures within several well-known IOs. We also suggest that this variance and the shadow of power politics cast over IOs provides fertile ground for comparative legislative scholars—including scholars of the U.S. Congress—to develop and test new theories of legislative procedure.

In this analytical essay, we advance a simple but powerful claim: scholars can better understand outcomes of international organizations (IOs) by developing theories that explicitly make assumptions about legislative process. Because process assumptions powerfully explain domestic legislative outcomes and many international assemblies demonstrate similarities to domestic legislatures, scholars could usefully employ legislative-process-centric approaches when theorizing about outcomes in world politics. Following an explication of why scholars might focus on legislative procedure, we describe several legislative procedures and highlight variance across those procedures within several well-known IOs. We also suggest that this variance and the shadow of power politics cast over IOs provides fertile ground for comparative legislative scholars—including scholars of the U.S. Congress—to develop and test new theories of legislative procedure.

Does the United Nations naming and shaming of specific violations of human rights decrease government repression? In this article, we argue that international shaming of specific human rights violations can weaken the target government, bringing new challenges and making the government cessation of repression less feasible. When international naming and shaming campaigns target specific repressive tactics, they increase the costs of some – but not all – means of repression. Using original data on naming and shaming by the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC), we show that the shaming of one physical integrity violation is jointly associated with decreases in that violation and increases in other violations of human rights.

Although scholarly consensus suggests that dissent causes repression, the behaviors are endogenous: governments and dissidents act in expectation of each other's behavior. Empirical studies have not accounted well for this endogeneity. We argue that preventive aspects of repression meaningfully affect the relationship between observed dissent and repression. When governments use preventive repression, the best response to dissent that does occur is unclear; observed dissent does not meaningfully predictresponsiverepression. By contrast, governments that do not engage inex anterepression will be more likely to do itex post. We follow U.S. voting scholarship and propose a new instrument to model the endogeneity: rainfall. We couple rainfall data in African provinces and U.S. states with data on dissent and repression and find that dissent fails to have a significant effect on responsive repression in states that engage in preventive repression.