Abstract
How effective are women’s rights international non-governmental organizations (WROs) in improving government respect for women’s rights? In this paper, we argue that WROs can be powerful actors in advancing women’s status, especially when they adopt a specific advocacy strategy: “naming and shaming” of governments or non-governmental agents. We assert that a targeted “naming and shaming” publicity strategy is necessary to exert pressure on the government to enforce women’s internationally recognized rights. Using a new dataset on the advocacy activities of over 1,595 WROs, we test the implications of our argument in a global statistical model from 1991 to 2005. The results indicate that WRO shaming is likely to improve women’s economic and social rights while having no discernible impact on women’s political rights. We also find that the mere presence of WROs is unlikely to have a significant impact on women’s rights. One major implication of the findings is that any significant improvement in respect for women’s rights partly requires a strong voice in advocacy. The findings also suggest that governments that face pressure from advocacy groups are more inclined to promote and enforce only the rights that do not threaten their own political power and status, such as women’s social and economic rights.
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Notes
With a specific focus on the government-citizen interactions and the government’s ability to enforce rules and norms in the society, in this study, women’s rights refers to the extent to which women are able to exercise and enjoy the objectives of economic, political, and social rights that are codified in a large body of international human rights law, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) (for a similar use of the term, see for example Neumayer and de Soysa 2007; Richards and Gelleny 2007; Peksen 2011; Cole 2012). Women’s rights violations are widespread; in the sample of countries and years used in this project, only 1.14 % of country-years have a perfect score on all three of CIRI Human Rights Dataset women’s rights measures (Cingranelli and Richards 2012). We define an international non-governmental organization as groups involved in three or more countries that are non-profit, open membership, and not controlled by a government or government agent (UIA 2008/2009). For this project, we focus on groups that have mission statements that refer to women and/or women and human rights.
In this article we focus only on the use of naming and shaming by WROs as a confrontational public strategy. We do not, however, suggest that WRO shaming is the only critical tactic adopted by women’s groups. While it is beyond the scope of this study, there are other bold and critical tactics that can also be effective in advancing women’s status. Examples of alternative bold moves include demonstrations, sit-ins, protest marches, strikes, formal written petition drives, and boycotts.
“Naming and shaming” or “shaming and blaming” refers to information gathered and dispersed by human rights advocacy groups about human rights practices within a country (Ron et al. 2005). This information is used to draw attention to human rights abuses and increase pressure on targeted states to change their human rights practices (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Murdie and Davis 2012).
There are other databases that quantify women’s status including, the Gender-related Development Index and Gender Empowerment Measure (UNDP 2006), the Gender Gap Index by the World Economic Forum (Hausmann et al. 2007), and several variables from the WomenStats Project Database by Caprioli et al. (2009). While these alternative gender-specific measures might be useful for some other empirical research, they are not suitable for time-series analysis because the data from these sources are either not available or available only for a few years especially prior to 2000. More importantly, the variables from these alternative sources do not directly measure the extent of government respect for women’s internationally recognized rights, which is the primary focus of our manuscript.
The following internationally recognized rights are included in the Women’s Political Rights variable: “The right to vote; the right to run for political office; the right to hold elected and appointed government positions; the right to join political parties; the right to petition government officials” (CIRI 2012, 71). Women’s Economic Rights is coded based on the following: “Equal pay for equal work; non-discrimination by employers; equality in hiring and promotion practices; job security (maternity leave, unemployment benefits, no arbitrary firing or layoffs, etc.); free choice of profession or employment without the need to obtain a husband or male relative’s consent; the right to gainful employment without the need to obtain a husband or male relative’s consent; the right to be free from sexual harassment in the workplace; the right to work at night; the right to work in occupations classified as dangerous; the right to work in the military and the police force” (CIRI 2012, 77). Women’s Social Rights is coded based on the extent of respect for several internationally recognized rights including: “The right to participate in social, cultural, and community activities; the right to an education; the right to equal inheritance; the freedom to choose a residence/domicile; freedom from female genital mutilation of children and of adults without their consent; freedom from forced sterilization; the right to enter into marriage on a basis of equality with men; the right to travel abroad; the right to obtain a passport; the right to confer citizenship to children or a husband; the right to initiate a divorce; the right to own, acquire, manage, and retain property brought into marriage” (Cingranelli and Richards 2012, 85).
Using data from Murdie and Davis (2012), we also explored whether naming and shaming on human rights issues in general by any human rights INGOs helps advance women’s status. Consistent with Murdie (2009), we found no statistically significant association between shaming by any human rights INGOs and women’s rights.
We coded a WRO as inclusive as possible: an organization could also have a mission that refers to human rights in general, for example, and still be classified as a WRO. The only criterion was a mention of women in particular in the mission statement.
We use the version of the Goldstein (1992) scale that has been updated by Virtual Research Associates.
Worth mentioning, the information in the event dataset does not allow us to distinguish between issue areas of focus for the WROs using the event data framework. A cursory look at the data does show much diversity in the types of issues WROs are focusing on, similar to the diversity in other overall human rights field.
Similar to Murdie and Davis (2012), we also estimated models using an alternative coding of the WRO shaming variable, which is a simple count of shaming events. More specifically, the count variable accounts for the total number of shaming events directed at a government or a non-government agent per country in a given year. Our results are similar when we replace the intensity variable with the count measure. The results from the models using the count variable are included in the online appendix. We choose to use the intensity measure over the count one because it better captures our theoretical argument on the significance of critical shaming by WROs.
We find no major change in the results when we replaced the CIRI’s integrity rights index with the empowerment index.
There are no published studies that contend that women’s rights is a predictor of WRO shaming. Nonetheless, to statistically examine whether WRO shaming is an endogenous regressor of women’s rights, we estimated two-stage instrumental variable (IV) regression models. Finding instrumental variables is a challenging task. We want a strong predictor of WRO shaming that is exogenous (i.e., not theoretically or statistically linked) to government respect for women’s rights. One particular variable we were able to find is Media Exposure, which is the total number of news reports about a country appearing in Reuters Global News Service in a given year (Murdie and Davis 2012). As reported in the online appendix, Durbin-Wu-Hausman exogeneity tests in the two-stage IV regression models indicate that WRO shaming is not an endogenous regressor of women’s rights and that our instrument has sufficient power, supporting the use of the one-stage models we provide here.
The results of a variety of models, along with the correlation between WRO shaming and WRO presence, appear in the online appendix.
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Amanda Murdie and Dursun Peksen contributed equally to the article.
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Murdie, A., Peksen, D. Women’s rights INGO shaming and the government respect for women’s rights. Rev Int Organ 10, 1–22 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-014-9200-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-014-9200-x