Abstract
Previous research suggests that most treaties are ineffective in ensuring countries’ compliance with human rights standards. It has been argued, however, that preferential trade agreements (PTAs) including ‘hard’ human rights standards can withhold economic benefits and, thus, can have a real potential to substantially reduce human rights violations. The following article questions this as existent work on the effects of PTAs on human rights standards neglects a selection process underlying the implementation of these treaties. Countries being aware of the ‘shadow of the future’ already take into account what may happen at the succeeding enforcement stage when establishing a particular PTA. This implies that states agree on ‘hard’ human rights standards in PTAs only if they have a general propensity to abide by human rights in the first place. For testing the empirical implications of their argument, the authors collected new data on PTAs in 1976/77-2009, and employ genetic matching techniques. The results support the theoretical argument that PTAs are unlikely to affect human rights compliance when controlling for the outlined selection problem.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The term ‘hard human rights standard’ (hard law) implies that non-compliance can be sanctioned by withholding trade benefits. ‘Soft human rights standards’ (soft law), on the other hand, refer to the simple mentioning of human rights practices in a treaty, while an enforcement mechanism is not given.
Although our study empirically focuses on the compliance with human rights standards, the theoretical argument can be applied to other policy issue areas such as environmental degradation, labor standards, or the impact of any international institution in general. For example, Bechtel and Tosun (2009) examine the impact of PTAs in the field of environmental protection. Due to the availability of data, however, we exclusively focus on PTAs and human rights compliance in this study.
However, Simmons and Hopkins (2005) criticize von Stein’s (2005) methodological approach. They show that even if one accounts for the screening effects of Article VIII of the IMF treaty, there is still significant constraining power to the treaty. We will come back to this methodological disagreement in our research design section below.
Note that this also supports Downs et al.’s (1996) notion that the high levels of compliance we usually observe in international governance do not necessarily mean that a deep level of cooperation has been reached.
While previous research has already demonstrated that it is crucial to control for the factors that lead countries to join an institution when analyzing the institution’s effectiveness (Hill 2010; Landman 2005; von Stein 2005) our approach differs from previous research in at least one important way. The aim of these previous studies was to show that countries’ decision to join an existing institution and compliance with this institution’s regulations are related. Our research takes this argument one step further and shows that countries design institutions, in our case PTAs, in a way that takes future compliance already into account.
Hafner-Burton (2005a) seems to be aware of this potential selection effect. She argues that this should not affect her results since countries with both good and bad human rights records tend to ratify PTAs with hard law human rights standards. However, in another paper she shows that factors, such as a democratic political system, significantly affect the likelihood of countries to enter into PTAs with hard human rights standards (Hafner-Burton 2005b). Since democracies tend to have a higher respect for human rights, this clearly supports our conjecture that those factors that lead countries to include hard human rights standards are also the factors that are responsible for their compliance with these standards.
An objection to our argument could be that some states are eager to include hard human rights standards in order to coerce their partner countries to respect human rights. However, this seems implausible, since including tough human rights standards in a PTA, while knowing that the counterpart is unlikely to abide by these standards, poses a severe challenge to a state. It can either choose not to enforce the standard, thereby suffering from reputational costs or it can decide to enforce the standard, which is likely to result in losing out on the gains of trade. Similar to the argument above then, actors should simply avoid this enforcement dilemma by including hard human rights standards only in those cases in which their counterparts are likely to abide by these standards anyway.
1977 constitutes the ‘effective’ starting year for the time period under study, since all our explanatory variables are lagged by one year.
This includes treaties, protocols, and other forms of amendments.
This approach does not take into account that countries can ratify a human rights treaty while exempting itself from certain obligations by using reservations (Landman 2005; Neumayer 2007). However, in order for our results to be closely comparable to the study of Hafner-Burton (2005a) we decided to use a simple ratification measure and not a weighted ratification measure that takes reservations into account.
Although political stability should address temporal dependencies due to its operationalization as a yearly count item, some of these dependencies might persist. We therefore also estimate a model with a torture-years variable (i.e., time in years elapsed since a country scored the value 3 or higher on political repression) and different sets of cubic splines (Beck et al. 1998).
In order to address this mechanism, Hafner-Burton (2005a: 617) also considers a variable on countries’ inflows and outflows of foreign direct investment. We decided to drop this ‘FDI investment’ variable due to three reasons. First, it theoretically addresses the same concerns as trade, which we do include. Second, Hafner-Burton’s (2005a) variable is statistically insignificant throughout any of her model estimations, rendering it unlikely that this item will crucially affect our results. Finally, the World Bank Development Indicators as the source for the investment variable suffer from missing values.
Despite several attempts, unfortunately, we were unable to obtain Hafner-Burton’s (2005a) original data.
One could argue that there is another selection process that already occurs at the stage when countries decide to enter into a PTA and, hence, that we should model first which countries form a PTA (Hafner-Burton 2005b). Although we do see that there might be a selection process that drives which countries form a PTA, we refrain from modeling this process here, since it is unlikely that it affects countries’ decisions on whether to include hard human rights standards or not therein. Put differently, states should enter into PTAs because of reasons pertaining to their trading relationship – and not because of reasons pertaining to their compliance with human rights. Therefore, ignoring this first selection process in our analysis should not bias our results.
With regard to the included control items in Models 4–7, note that a common interpretation is generally not possible, since the matching technique seeks to address and control for the imbalances of those variables between the treatment and control group in the first place. Hence, we only include those items in our models in order to control for any remaining imbalances.
The online appendix and the replication material for the empirical analysis in this article can be found at the journal’s website: http://www.springer.com/social+sciences/journal/11558 .
References
Abbott, K., & Snidal, D. (2000). Hard and soft law in international governance. International Organization, 54, 421–456.
Amnesty International. (2011). Amnesty international report 2011. London: Amnesty International.
Bechtel, M., & Tosun, J. (2009). Changing economic openness for policy convergence: When can trade agreements induce convergence of environmental regulation? International Studies Quarterly, 53, 931–953.
Beck, N., Katz, J., & Tucker, R. (1998). Taking time seriously: Time-series cross-section analysis with a binary dependent variable. American Journal of Political Science, 42, 1260–1288.
Bernhagen, P. (2008). Business and international environmental agreements: Business influence over participation and compliance. Global Environmental Politics, 8, 78–110.
Boehmer, C., Gartzke, E., & Nordstrom, T. (2004). Do international organizations promote peace? World Politics, 57, 1–38.
Cingranelli, D. L., & Richards, D. L. (1999). Respect for human rights after the end of the cold war. Journal of Peace Research, 36, 511–534.
Cottier, T. (2002). Trade and human rights: A relationship to discover. Journal of International Economic Law, 5, 111–132.
Diamond, A., & Sekhon, J. S. (2013). Genetic matching for estimating causal effects: A general multivariate matching method for achieving balance in observational studies. Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming.
Dorussen, H., & Ward, H. (2008). Intergovernmental organizations and the Kantian peace: A network perspective. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 52, 189–212.
Downs, G., Rocke, D., & Barsoom, P. (1996). Is the good news about compliance good news about cooperation? International Organization, 50, 379–406.
Fearon, J. (1998). Bargaining, enforcement, and international cooperation. International Organization, 52, 269–305.
Gibney, M., Cornett, L., & Wood, R. M. (2005). Political terror scale 1976–2002. Available at the political terror scale website: http://www.politicalterrorscale.org/.
Gibney, M., Cornett, L., & Wood, R. M. (2011). Political terror scale 1976–2009. Available at the political terror scale website: http://www.politicalterrorscale.org/.
Gilligan, M. J., & Sergenti, E. J. (2008). Do UN interventions cause peace? Using matching to improve causal inference. Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 3, 89–122.
Gleditsch, K. S. (2008). Modified Polity P4 and P4D Data, Version 3.0. Available at personal website: http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~ksg/Polity.html.
Goodman, R., & Jinks, D. (2003). Measuring the effects of human rights treaties. European Journal of International Law, 14, 171–183.
Goodman, R., & Jinks, D. (2004). How to influence states: Socialization and international human rights law. Duke Law Journal, 54, 621.
Gould, C. (2004). Globalizing democracy and human rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hafner-Burton, E. (2005a). Trading human rights: How preferential trade agreements influence government repression. International Organization, 59, 593–629.
Hafner-Burton, E. (2005b). Forum shopping for human rights: The transformation of preferential trade agreements. Typescript prepared for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, 1–4 September 2005.
Hafner-Burton, E., & Tsutsui, K. (2005). Human rights in a globalizing world: The paradox of empty promises. American Journal of Sociology, 110, 1373–1411.
Hathaway, O. A. (2002). Do human rights treaties make a difference? Yale Faculty Law Journal, 111, 1935–2042.
Henderson, C. W. (1991). Conditions affecting the use of political repression. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 35, 120–142.
Henderson, C. W. (1993). Population pressures and political repression. Social Science Quarterly, 74, 323–333.
Hill, D. W. (2010). Estimating the effects of human rights treaties on state behavior. Journal of Politics, 72, 1161–1174.
Ho, D. E., Imai, K., King, G., & Stuart, E. A. (2007). Matching as nonparametric preprocessing for reducing model dependence in parametric causal inference. Political Analysis, 15, 199–236.
Hollyer, J. A., & Rosendorff, B. P. (2011). Why do authoritarian regimes sign the convention against torture? Signaling, domestic politics, and non-compliance. Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 6, 275–327.
Ingram, P., Robinson, J., & Busch, M. (2005). The intergovernmental network of world trade: IGO connectedness, governance, and embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology, 111, 824–858.
Keith, L. (1999). The United Nations International Covenant on civil and political rights: Does it make a difference in human rights behavior? Journal of Peace Research, 36, 95–118.
Koremenos, B. (2005). Contracting around international uncertainty. American Political Science Review, 99, 549–565.
Koremenos, B., Lipson, C., & Snidal, D. (2001). The rational design of international institutions. International Organization, 55, 761–799.
King, G., Tomz, M., & Wittenberg, J. (2000). Making the most of statistical analyses: Improving interpretation and presentation. American Journal of Political Science, 44, 341–355.
Landman, T. (2005). Protecting human rights. A comparative study. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.
Marshall, M., & Jaggers, K. (2002). POLITY IV project: Political regime characteristics and transitions, 1800–2002. Dataset user’s manual. College Park, MD: University of Maryland.
Mitchell, N. J., & McCormick, J. M. (1988). Economic and political explanations of human rights violations. World Politics, 40, 476–498.
Moravcsik, A. (1995). Explaining international human rights regimes: Liberal theory and Western Europe. European Journal of International Relations, 1, 157–189.
Morgan, S. L., & Winship, C. (2007). Counterfactuals and causal inference: Methods and principles for social research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Neumayer, E. (2005). Qualified ratification: Explaining reservations to international human rights treaties. Journal of Legal Studies, 36, 397–429.
Neumayer, E. (2007). Do international human rights treaties improve respect for human rights? Journal of Conflict Resolution, 49, 925–953.
Oneal, J., & Russett, B. (1999). The Kantian peace: The pacific benefits of democracy, interdependence, and international organizations, 1885–1992. World Politics, 52, 1–37.
Pevehouse, J. C. (2002). Democracy from the outside-In? International organizations and democratization. International Organization, 56, 515–549.
Poe, S. C., & Tate, C. N. (1994). Repression of human rights to personal integrity in the 1980s: A global analysis. American Political Science Review, 88, 853–900.
Poe, S. C., Tate, C. N., & Keith, L. C. (1999). Repression of the human right to personal integrity revisited: A global cross-national study covering the years 1976–1993. International Studies Quarterly, 43, 291–313.
Pritchard, K. (1989). Human rights and development: Theory and data. In D. P. Forsythe (Ed.), Human rights and development: International Views (pp. 329–347). London: Macmillan.
Richards, D. L., Gelleny, R. D., & Sacko, D. H. (2001). Money with a mean streak? Foreign economic penetration and government respect for human rights in developing countries. International Studies Quarterly, 45, 219–239.
Risse, T., Ropp, S., & Sikkink, K. (1999). The power of human rights. International norms and domestic change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schwarz, R. (2004). The paradox of sovereignty, regime type, and human rights compliance. International Journal of Human Rights, 8, 199–215.
Sekhon, J. S. (2007). Multivariate and propensity score matching software with automated balance optimization: The matching package for R. Journal of Statistical Software, 42, 1–52.
Sen, A. (2004). Elements of a theory of human rights. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 32, 315–356.
Simmons, B. (2009). Mobilizing for human rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Simmons, B., & Hopkins, D. (2005). The constraining power of international treaties: Theory and methods. American Political Science Review, 99, 623–631.
Spilker, G. (2012). Helpful organizations: IGO membership and environmental quality in developing countries. British Journal of Political Science, 42, 345–370.
von Stein, J. (2005). Do treaties constrain or screen? Selection bias and treaty compliance. American Political Science Review, 99, 611–622.
Vreeland, J. (2008). Political institutions and human rights: Why dictatorships enter into the United Nations Convention Against Torture. International Organization, 62, 65–101.
Ward, H. (2006). International linkages and environmental sustainability: The effectiveness of the regime network. Journal of Peace Research, 43, 149–166.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Spilker, G., Böhmelt, T. The impact of preferential trade agreements on governmental repression revisited. Rev Int Organ 8, 343–361 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-012-9155-8
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-012-9155-8