Abstract
How does state obligation to international human rights treaties (HRTs) affect mobilized dissent? We argue that obligations to protect human rights affect not only state behavior but also the behavior of dissidents. We present a theory in which the effect of HRTs on dissent is conditional on expectations of when it will constrain government behavior. We assume that HRT obligation increases the likelihood that government agents face litigation costs for repression but argue that leaders are only constrained when they would be most likely to repress. The expectation of constraint creates opportunity: citizens are more likely to dissent in HRT-obligated states with secure leaders and weak domestic courts. We find empirical support for the implications of our theory using country-month data on HRT obligation and dissent events from 1990 to 2004.
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Notes
Excepting this rule, Murdie and Bhasin (2011) find that international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with activities on the ground are connected with an increase in the incidence of domestic protests.
Although domestic institutions and behaviors are often more salient to those considering mobilization than international forces, their presence and effects do not preclude treaties from having a separate or supporting effect in facilitating mobilization.
One of the most consistent arguments in political violence is that state authorities respond to domestic threats with repression (cf. Davenport 2007a). For more on repression in response to dissent, see, e.g., Poe and Tate (1994), Gartner and Regan (1996), Moore (2000), Regan and Henderson (2002), and Carey (2006).
We do not explicitly theorize the mobilization stage. If members of a group are sufficiently coordinated such that they could act collectively, we model the group’s decision to act or not.
We assume both repression and dissent require resources and effort that increase with the severity of the action, making them costly for the actors.
This is an informal presentation of a formal model, which we have relegated to the Supplementary Appendix.
Dissidents can take action against the state for any reason; they need not dissent for policy change related to the terms of a particular HRT. All that matters is that they believe authorities who repress will be a small amount more likely to face costs as a result of HRT obligation—no matter the reason for the dissent.
The actors can choose any form or amount of repression and dissent, respectively, including not to repress or dissent at all. Repression at level 0 is the equivalent of accommodation, granting concessions to the group, while refusal to dissent accepts the status quo. See Ritter (2014) for a similar set of assumptions.
We assume actors have the same expectation of the leader’s likelihood of retaining power. This is because our concept of the probability of retention is based on the accumulation of a number of observable determinants of a leader’s hold on power in addition to some amount of error; it is an estimate, as we discuss in depth with regard to operationalization below. It is an estimate made by both actors, drawing on elements from the observable world and including some error. It is possible that leaders may have more information that might reduce the variance of their estimates, but that should not necessarily bias the average estimate away from that of the group.
This is likely to be true when the dissidents are not members of a winning coalition (which, as those dissatisfied with the status quo, they rarely are).
In making the assumptions illustrated in Fig. 1, we assume that it is not the act of repression itself that leads to retention or removal from office, though that act does entail costs to the leader in the form of resource costs. Nor does dissent itself oust a leader or encourage others to do so. Instead, we assume that it is the policy outcome of the interaction that matters to the supporting coalition that would keep a leader in power. Regardless of the size of that coalition, the in-group wants the government to retain resources for distribution to them. If the leader retains those resources, it matters not how much s/he repressed an out-group to retain them. If, however, the leader loses some of those resources to a group such that they cannot be distributed to the coalition, s/he is less likely to remain in power.
Despite the increased risks associated with treaty obligation, there are a variety of benefits that tempt the state to ratify. These benefits may be short- or long-term, domestic or international, normative or self-serving. See, e.g., Hathaway (2003, 2007); Hafner-Burton et al. (2008); Vreeland (2008); Simmons (2009).
“Thailand: Implementing the UN Convention Against Torture.” Accessed January 19, 2011 at http://www.apt.chi.en/. See Merry (2006) for additional examples.
In some states, international law must and will be incorporated into domestic law, but this need not happen for our theory’s predictions to hold. If the authorities and the population expect the state to experience even a small increase in the likelihood of incurring litigation costs—through the court’s increased likelihood of hearing a case, even if it rules in favor of the state—as the result of an international obligation, this changes the incentive environment enough to affect dissident behavior according to our theory.
This is not to say that potential dissidents themselves bring legal claims against the HRT-committed leader; the expectation that authorities will be brought to court by anyone experiencing repression activates government constraint and thus affects the group’s dissent strategy.
Many scholars have found different directional relationships (e.g., Lichbach 1987; Moore 1998, 2000). Shellman (2006), Pierskalla (2010), and Ritter (2014) argue the conflicting findings in the literature have arisen because scholars have not derived predictions from a strategic understanding of the interaction.
Although individuals may not be aware of HRT obligation status, they respond to changes in popular expectations about repression. NGOs play a vital role in providing information about rights and HRT ratification status, influencing citizen expectations of repression and dissent.
A number of analyses with additional or different variables or specifications are available in our Supplemental Appendix. Replication files will be made available on the authors’ websites and the website of this journal.
For example, data from the Political Risk Service and the World Governance Indicators combine information on opposition mobilization and the government’s response.
Data from the Cross-National Time-Series (CNTS) Data Archive (Banks 2010) is an example.
Other data are available at lower levels of temporal aggregation for one or few countries (e.g., Rasler 1996).
Results are robust to using country-year observations, as shown in the Supplementary Appendix.
Using data that relies on international news reports comes with bias that could potentially influence our results. Some countries have a larger media presence than others, such that stories will be more likely to be reported from there than a country with just as much dissent but fewer reporters. International reporters also tend to focus on bigger, more violent events while more minor events are less likely to be reported. Our measure of dissent, which is described in more detail in the Supplementary Appendix, includes very low-level events but may still miss smaller, local events. This should bias our estimates toward finding no effect on dissent outcomes.
These data are described in more detail in Ritter (2014) and its online materials, as well as in the Supplementary Appendix.
This measure essentially treats any dissent event of any size or level of violence as the same. The formal theory technically assumes the group will choose a level of dissent from a continuous range, such that obligation to a treaty should lead to a lower level of dissent under certain conditions. For purposes of empirical estimation, we translate this concept as the continuous likelihood of observing a dissent event. For a discussion of the conceptual difference between likelihood and level of conflict events, see Ritter (2014).
We are interested in the long-term effect of the obligation, rather than the effect of initial ratification. It is possible that a treaty alters state behavior from one year to the next much less after it has been committed for many years than it did in the years immediately after ratification. However, our theory does not assume that a group looks to changes in actual behavior from year to year to make its decisions. We argue that the treaty effects dissident behavior if a group acts differently in a state that is so obligated than it would if the same state were not obligated to the treaty. If a group in a state that has been obligated to the ICCPR for ten years acts differently than it would if the same state were not so obligated, then the treaty alters behavior. Therefore, states do not drop out of our sample in the country-months following ratification.
For more on the variety of empirical indicators of judicial effectiveness, see Ríos-Figueroa and Staton (2014).
LJI is conceptually the best available approximation of the theoretical concept we present here, but using a country-year measure in a country-month analysis means that we assume no change in Judicial Effectiveness within a given year. Because institutions are “sticky” for a variety of reasons (e.g., Grief and Laitin 2004; Page 2006) and domestic court effectiveness is unlikely to change rapidly (e.g., Staton 2006; Carrubba 2009), we do not think this unreasonable.
The likelihood of losing power in a given country-month is low, so the measure is highly skewed toward one. We use additional measures of job security in the Supplementary Appendix.
Expectations of Executive Job Security and Judicial Effectiveness are both predicted values. Introducing the errors of estimation requires a recalculation of the variance-covariance matrix, requiring bootstrapping.
For both Figs. 2 and 3 we classify an ineffective judiciary as a state with the sample minimum of judicial effectiveness and an effective one with the sample maximum. We replicated these figures at each tenth percentile to show that the conclusions are robust to a number of different cutpoints; these are presented in the Supplemental Appendix.
We follow Brambor et al. (2006) and subtract the first calculated predicted probability from the second predicted probability and repeat this process at each 0.01 interval of Job Security from 0.9 up to a value of 1.0 (its maximum possible value) and graph the first difference across the observed range of job security.
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Thanks to Paul Almeida, Phil Arena, Sam Bell, Christian Davenport, Jackie DeMeritt, Amanda Licht, Yonatan Lupu, Nate Monroe, Will Moore, Cesare Romano, Chris Sullivan, and Scott Wolford for invaluable comments and discussions, and to Rob O’Reilly for data assistance. Previous versions of this article were presented at the 2013 MultiRights Summer Institute at the University of Oslo; the 2012 Annual Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association; the Peace and Conflict Workshop at the University of Notre Dame; the Security, Peace, and Conflict Workshop at Duke University; and the political science departments at Binghamton University; Indiana University; the London School of Economics and Political Science; the University of Buffalo; the University of California, Merced; the University of Illinois; the University of Iowa; the University of Mississippi; the University of Michigan; the University of South Carolina; and the University of Texas. Many thanks to these audiences for helpful comments and suggestions.
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Ritter, E.H., Conrad, C.R. Human rights treaties and mobilized dissent against the state. Rev Int Organ 11, 449–475 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-015-9238-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-015-9238-4