Suchergebnisse

The human rights movement has spent considerable energy developing and promoting the adoption of both international and domestic legal prohibitions against torture. Empirical scholarship testing the effectiveness of these prohibitions using observational data, however, has produced mixed results. In this paper, we explore one possible mechanism through which these prohibitions may be effective: dampening public support for torture. Specifically, we conducted a survey experiment to explore the impact of international and constitutional law on public support for torture. We found that a bare majority of respondents in our control group support the use of torture, and that presenting respondents with arguments that this practice violates international law or constitutional law did not produce a statistically significant decrease in support. These findings are consistent with prior research suggesting, even in democracies, that legal prohibitions on torture have been ineffective.

Although the question of whether constitutional rights matter is of great theoretical and practical importance, little is known about whether constitutional rights impact government behavior. In this article, we test the effectiveness of six political rights. We hypothesize that a difference exists between organizational rights—most notably, the rights to unionize and form political parties—and individual rights. Specifically, we suggest that organizational rights increase de facto rights protection because they create organizations with the incentives and means to protect the underlying right, which renders these rights self‐enforcing. Such organizations are not necessarily present to protect individual rights, which could make individual rights less effective. We test our theory using a variety of statistical methods on a data set of constitutional rights for 186 countries. The results support our theory: Organizational rights are associated with increased de facto rights protection, while individual rights are not.

International legal scholars have long recognized the importance of the rules and processes by which states adhere to international legal obligations and "translate" them into their domestic legal systems. Research by political scientists on specific issue areas likewise increasingly recognizes that domestic implementation is crucial to international law compliance and effectiveness. Yet the lack of systematic data makes it difficult to assemble an overall picture of the relationship between international law and domestic law around the world, let alone to document its evolution over time. Recent qualitative surveys of state practice have begun to fill that gap, but provide only a snapshot in time and are limited to relatively few countries. Some quantitative projects cover more countries, but address only a limited number of questions based solely on the text of national constitutions.