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International Law and Voter Preferences: the Case of Foreign Human Rights Violations

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Notes

  1. The country’s official name is the Union of Myanmar, but the US government and other opponents of its military junta call it Burma (its name until 1989). We refer to it as “Myanmar” when discussing international law, since it is under this name the country is currently obligated, but as “Burma/Myanmar” when discussing US sanction policies.

  2. Tomz (2008) also tests for an international law effect among British members of parliament. Our research considers only US actors.

  3. Calculations of cost may differ where human rights abuses feed humanitarian crises and armed conflicts that produce large cross-border population movements and other negative international security externalities (Salehyan 2008). Myanmar fits this pattern.

  4. For an extensive discussion of the “do something” imperative of domestic politics and its relationship to economic statecraft, see Drezner 1999.

  5. Jacobs and Page 2005 have a more skeptical evaluation.

  6. Knowledge Networks uses a probability-based panel to draw representative population samples from across the USA within a known sampling frame, http://www.knowledgenetworks.com/knpanel/index.html.

  7. Another consideration was Tomz’ (2008) use of Myanmar in his experimental scenario. If our findings had differed dramatically, that comparability would have allowed us to more easily isolate the sources of the difference.

  8. Congress passed bills of this type in 1990, 1993, 1995–1996, 1997, 2003, and 2007.

  9. A pre-test conducted in July 2007 (n = 297) on a nationally representative sample confirmed our expectation of low levels of prior knowledge about Myanmar’s location and history.

  10. We treat only (a) exact matches of the search string; (b) “all search words (or their variants) near each other in any order” as a “reference.” For this same period, we found 415 references to Burma and “democracy” and 267 to “freedom” as well as 231 references to Burma and “human rights,” and 16 references to “workers” rights.

  11. “Burma” appeared within 25 words of “human rights” in 928 articles over this period, with similar returns for “Myanmar.” By comparison, these same searches using “China” yielded 300 articles for “international law,” and more than 3000 for “human rights.”

  12. The New York Times published 12 articles mentioning Myanmar in June 2007, and between August 23 and September 22, 2007, it published 29 articles mentioning Myanmar. The Washington Post published 3 articles in the first period, and 22 in the second. For the sake of comparison, during August 23 and September 22, the New York Times published 25 articles mentioning Malaysia, and 411 articles mentioning France.

  13. The same logic applies to individuals with well-informed prior opinions about US policy toward Burma/Myanmar or its government’s poor human rights record.

  14. This is also true of articles published in June 2007, despite the fact that the ICRC published a rare report condemning the practices of Myanmar’s junta on June 29, 2007 in which it discusses legal standards, http://reliefweb.int/report/myanmar/myanmar-icrc-denounces-major-and-repeated-violations-international-humanitarian-law. The Washington Post had one article on June 30, 2007 on the ICRC’s action which references international humanitarian law; the New York Times published a squib that mentioned only “abuses”.

  15. The rhetoric of “national interest,” often used by American politicians to justify foreign policy choices that run counter to commonly held moral values—supporting autocratic regimes in oil-rich states for example—provides prima facie evidence that American politicians believe voters understand such linkages.

  16. The survey encompassed a total of 24 experimental conditions, thereby giving us 113 respondents per condition. The full survey can be found in Appendix A.

  17. Respondents in severity condition 2 were slightly more conservative on average than those in severity condition 1, but the difference in means is small, .135 on a 7-point scale. Respondents in interest condition 2 were more conservative on average than those in interest condition 3, but the difference in means was again small, .172 on a 7-point scale. Neither difference was significant in a Kolmogorov-Smirnov equality-of-distributions test.

  18. Breaking the sample down by international law and interest conditions left the differences in mean responses in the expected direction, and with statistical significance at the .001 level in all but two conditions. The difference was significant at the .10 level in the (IL 4, INT 2) condition and was not significant in the (IL 4, INT 3) condition.

  19. More conservative respondents were slightly more supportive of sanctions when given no information about legal status and when told imposing sanctions would not hurt US interests. The effect was statistically significant (t = 1.95).

  20. We similarly find no impact from the international law treatments on respondents’ likelihood to take personal action with an ordered probit model using the entire sample.

  21. Note the USTR under the Obama Administration was heavily involved in efforts to improve labor practices and collective bargaining rights around the globe, in part to try to prevent situations in which congressional sanctions might be credibly threatened. http://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/USTR%20DOL%20Trade%20-%20Labor%20Report%20-%20Final.pdf. We thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.

  22. This information is on file with the authors and is available upon request.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, Arnold A. Salzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University, 420 West 118th Street, 1326 IAB, New York, NY, 10027, USA

    Tonya L. Putnam

  2. Department of Politics, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Corwin Hall, Princeton, NJ, 08544, USA

    Jacob N. Shapiro

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  1. Tonya L. Putnam
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  2. Jacob N. Shapiro
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Correspondence to Tonya L. Putnam.

Appendix: Sample Demographics

Appendix: Sample Demographics

Table 6 Sample demographics
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Appendix: Questionnaire—To Be Hosted Online

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Putnam, T.L., Shapiro, J.N. International Law and Voter Preferences: the Case of Foreign Human Rights Violations. Hum Rights Rev 18, 243–262 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-017-0452-8

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