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Trojan horses in liberal international organizations? How democratic backsliders undermine the UNHRC

Contribution to the Special Issue “Autocratic Regimes, Democratic Backsliding, and International Organizations”

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Abstract

Liberal democracy is facing renewed challenges from a growing group of states undergoing democratic backsliding. While entrenched autocrats have long resented and contested the established liberal order, we know far less about how newer backsliding states behave on the international stage. We argue these states, who joined prominent western liberal institutions prior to their backsliding, will use their established membership in these organizations both to protect themselves from future scrutiny regarding adherence to liberal democratic values and to oppose the prevailing western liberal norms that increasingly conflict with their evolving interests. Using voting data from the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) from 2006-2021, we show that backsliding states are more likely to vote against targeted resolutions that name and shame specific countries. We supplement this analysis with detailed data from the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) and combine regression analysis and a structural topic model (STM) to show that backsliding states are more critical in their UPR reports when evaluating advanced western democracies, and more likely to emphasize issues that align with their own interests while de-emphasizing ones that might threaten government power and control over citizens.

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Data Availability Statement

The datasets generated and analyzed by the authors for the current study are available in the Dataverse repository,

Notes

  1. Although the UNHRC’s predecessor—the UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR)—was founded in 1946, we focus on the time period from 2006 to the present since democratic backsliding is an historically recent phenomenon that began in the early– to mid–2010s (Haggard and Kaufman , 2021).

  2. Pahre (1995) illustrates this theoretical tension in the context of the European Union’s enlargement.

  3. For a related project that is consistent with our approach, see Lipps and Jacob (2023).

  4. A fascinating case-study of this approach is provided by Baturo (2023) who shows how Russia has used the language of anti-Nazism to dull criticism of its domestic policies.

  5. https://searchlibrary.ohchr.org/search?ln=en &cc=Voting. Last accessed 9-March-2023.

  6. The possible votes are “yes,” “no,” or “abstain”.

  7. The states targeted in these resolutions, and the number of times they were targeted, are: Belarus (10), Burundi (7), Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (1), Democratic Republic of the Congo (1), Eritrea (3), Ethiopia (1), Georgia (4), Iran (7), Israel (29), Myanmar (6), Nicaragua (3), Philippines (1), South Sudan (1), Sri Lanka (2), Syria (30), Ukraine (6), Venezuela (5), and Yemen (3).

  8. Note that the unit of observation for Fig. 4 is UNHRC member state-resolution-vote.

  9. The 0.5 threshold on the EDI is frequently used in recent work on backsliding to distinguish democracies from autocracies (e.g., Haggard and Kaufman 2021).

  10. We choose 1995 as our starting point for several reasons. First, 1995 roughly corresponds with the end of the third wave of democracy (Huntington , 1991; Alizada et al. , 2022). Furthermore, 1995 also marks the beginning of what scholars have termed the third wave of autocratization, which followed the third wave of democracy and continues into the present. One of the defining features of this third wave of autocratization is that, unlike previous waves, democracies are over-represented in the universe of countries moving toward autocracy (Luhrmann and Lindberg , 2019); in other words, democratic backsliding is a core characteristic of the third wave of autocratization.

  11. The following UNHRC member states meet these criteria for backsliding in one or more of the years between 2006 and 2021: Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Fiji, Hungary, India, Madagascar, Nicaragua, Philippines, Poland, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, and Venezuela. While our rationale for using 1995 as a baseline to identify these cases of backsliding states in the UNHRC is related to the end of the third wave of democracy and the start of the subsequent wave of autocratization, there is no single year that clearly marks the end of the former and beginning of the latter. We explore the effect of using 1995 as our baseline year in the Appendix, available on the Review of International Organizations’ webpage. Specifically, in Appendix Figure A1 we show the democratic trajectory of the states we identify as cases of backsliding among UNHRC members from 1985 until 2021, finding that overall these states’ levels of democracy increased in the 10 years prior to 1995. Furthermore, with a few exceptions, these states experienced steady, monotonic declines in their democracy scores sometime after 1995. In Appendix Table A1 we also show what our universe of cases of backsliding members of the UNHRC would be if we set the baseline years as 2000 and 2006, the year in which the UNHRC was created. Here, we find that most of the cases of backsliding we identify with the 1995 baseline are also coded as backsliding with these alternative baseline years. This gives us further confidence in our choice of 1995 as the baseline.

  12. While many studies use data on human rights violations from the CIRI human rights data project, those data only go through 2011. We use the Our World in Data dataset, which provides coverage through 2019.

  13. Since several of our control variables contain missing data, only 11,809 of the total 13,721 recorded votes on targeted UNHRC resolutions we discussed above are represented in the model reported in Table 1.

  14. We define backsliding as a process unique to democracies in that the starting point for any case of backsliding is within a democratic state. However, the literature recently has focused more broadly on autocratization, which is defined as any move away from democracy in both democracies and autocracies (Luhrmann and Lindberg , 2019). When we operationalize backsliding as a 10% or greater shift away from democracy in any state, regardless of starting point, we find similar results. See Appendix 3.

  15. The opposite signs on voting ‘no’ and ‘abstaining’ is mechanical since states can only vote once. As Fig. 2 above illustrates, what is happening since 2012 is that states are moving away from voting “yes.” Backsliding states in particular are now more likely to vote “no.” See also Appendix 4.

  16. https://upr-info-database.uwazi.io/en/. Last accessed 9-March-2023.

  17. See Figure A2 in Appendix 6.

  18. There are over 60 types of issues in our dataset, and they include topics such as: “death penalty,” “elections,” “extrajudicial executions,” “freedom of the press,” “labour rights,” “minority rights,” “trafficking,” and “women’s rights.”

  19. It is important to note that since all UN member states, rather than just members of the UNHRC, can write UPR reviews, the subset of cases of backsliding in these models is larger than in the UNHRC models, which only includes states that were members of the Council between 2006 and 2021. The following states meet our operationalization of backsliding and wrote at least one UPR review of an advanced democracy between 2008 and 2020: Bangladesh, Belarus, Benin, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Fiji, Honduras, Hungary, India, Mali, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Philippines, Poland, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Zambia.

  20. Summary statistics for these data are reported in Appendix 7.

  21. The dispersion parameters for models 1 and 2 in Table 2 are 0.61 and 0.54, respectively.

  22. See Appendix 8.

  23. See Appendix 9.

  24. See Appendix 10.

  25. See Winzen (2023) for a related argument in the EU context. Prasad and Nooruddin (2023) advance a similar argument in the context of states fighting domestic insurgency.

  26. We note that while in Section 4.2 we focus exclusively on UPR reports where the state under review is one of 19 established democracies, in the analyses below we include all available UPR reports, regardless of the state under review, to explore the types of human rights issues backsliding states emphasize.

  27. We use the stm package in R to tune the number of topics and estimate parameters. We select the number of topics (6) that maximizes semantic coherence and exclusivity (see Appendix Figure A3). We pre-process all text by eliminating common English stopwords, numbers, and punctuation. We also lowercase all text.

  28. See Appendix 12 for representative excerpts from UPR reports in each topic.

  29. Confidence intervals in both figures are at the 95% level.

  30. We owe this turn of phrase to an anonymous reviewer.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Christina Cottiero, Emilie Hafner-Burton, Stephan Haggard, Lauren Prather, Christina Schneider, and all participants at two workshops hosted by the UC Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California, San Diego for invaluable detailed comments and suggestions, as well as the support and encouragement to develop this project. We also thank participants at the ISA 2023, PEIO 2023, and APSA 2023 conferences and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on previous drafts.

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  1. Assistant Professor, School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85281, USA

    Anna M. Meyerrose

  2. Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor of Indian Politics, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, NW, 20057, USA

    Irfan Nooruddin

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The order of authors reflects the significance of the authors’ contributions a. research design and conceptualization: A.M. (55%) I.N. (45%) b. statistical analysis: A.M. (60%), I.N. (40%) c. writing: A.M. (75%), I.N. (25%)

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Meyerrose, A.M., Nooruddin, I. Trojan horses in liberal international organizations? How democratic backsliders undermine the UNHRC. Rev Int Organ (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-023-09511-6

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