Political Repression. Linda Camp Keith

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СКАЧАТЬ 2001; Vreeland 2003); thus even the hypothesized indirect benefits seem unlikely.

      These results bring into serious question the expectation that the loans will lead to improved human rights, since this influence is expected to come indirectly through economic growth and political stability. Interestingly, empirical studies have also demonstrated that the programs do not lead to increased political stability but rather increase the probability of civil conflict (for example, Sidell 1988; Di John 2005; Keen 2005; Abouharb and Cingranelli 2008). A growing number of empirical studies have addressed specifically the impact of these programs on human rights. The earliest empirical study to my knowledge is Pion-Berlin’s (1984) analysis of the impact of International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans on repression in Argentina during 1958–1980, which demonstrated that the stabilization programs increased repression against labor groups. Subsequent studies of personal integrity abuse have also demonstrated a link between these programs and increased state imprisonment, torture, killing, and disappearances (Franklin 1997; Keith and Poe 2000). The most comprehensive and rigorous study to date (Abouharb and Cingranelli 2008) demonstrates that not only do the structural adjustment programs (both IMF and World Bank) fail to deliver economic development, but also the agreements fail even to promote increased political stability. They demonstrate that instead, the deleterious economic and social effects of the agreements have destabilized the countries with increased levels of civil conflict—antigovernment demonstrations, riots, and rebellion in particular. The increased civil conflict in turn increases the state’s level of physical integrity abuse (torture, murder, disappearance, and political imprisonment). Indeed, the likelihood of physical integrity abuse increases the longer the state participates in a structural adjustment agreement, even when controlling for selection effects and most of the known factors that affect such abuse. And similarly, the longer the state participates in a structural adjustment agreement, the weaker the state’s protection is of worker rights. Thus, we are left with overwhelming evidence that multilateral aid is generally harmful to a broad range of rights, and that some components of bilateral aid have either no effect or a deleterious effect. The evidence in regard to trade openness and foreign economic penetration is mixed but somewhat more optimistic than that of the aid relationship.

      Trade Openness and Foreign Economic Penetration. Empirical studies that have tested the liberal perspective on the linkage between trade and human rights protection, though small in number, have consistently confirmed these expectations (Apodaca 2001, 2007; Harrelson-Stephens and Calloway 2003). Apodaca (2001, 2007) found that exports had the third-strongest impact in predicting personal integrity abuses in 1990–1996, with only democracy and conflict producing larger effects. Her model controls for several important domestic conditions (conflict, population, democracy, and education expenditures) and international factors (conflict, bilateral and multilateral aid, foreign direct investment, and portfolio investment). Harrelson-Stephens and Calloway (2003) examine three measures of trade openness over a significantly longer period than Apodaca (1976–1996): trade openness (the sum of exports and imports divided by GDP, which captures the level of trade but not the symmetrical nature of trade between states), level of exports relative to GDP, and a 4-point trade liberalization index. They find that, when controlling for the standard human rights model, each of their trade openness measures does demonstrate a decrease in the likelihood of state repression in three separate models, supporting liberal expectations. However, they do caution that the coefficients are rather small. But given the effect over time through the lagged dependent variable, they calculate .5 decrease in the 5-point personal integrity abuse scale in ten years’ time. This is roughly comparable to the impact that Poe, Tate, and Keith (1999) found for the presence of international war and about half the effect they found for economic development, which, interestingly, fails to achieve statistical significance in Harrelson-Stephens and Calloway’s model. Apodaca’s (2007) study, which covers a longer period (1989–2002) than her first study, confirms her earlier finding even though she employs a different measure of trade openness (exports plus imports as a percentage of GDP). Thus much of the initial empirical evidence does support the liberal perspective that open trade has a positive effect on at least one dimension of human rights, the right to personal integrity.

      The evidence examining the effect of foreign investment has been much more inconsistent and in one study has varied depending upon the category of repression. Apodaca (2001) found that foreign direct investment (FDI) did lead to moderate decreases in repression of personal integrity rights for the period 1990–1996; however, she also found that the portfolio investment did not have a statistically significant effect. She had in fact hypothesized that this type of investment, which tends to be “short-ventures, highly mobile, and subject to capital flight,” places more restrictions on the regime’s taxing and spending policy options, and in particular restricts spending on social welfare programs while doing little to enhance economic growth (595). In her 2007 study of the years 1989–2002 the effect of FDI disappears, although here her model is more focused on the media and thus controls for an additional set of measures than in her 2001 study. She does not include the portfolio measure here either, so the results are somewhat difficult to compare. Richards, Gelleny, and Sacko’s (2001) analysis of both categories of political repression in 1981–1995 provides some additional insight into these mixed findings. They also find that FDI reduces the likelihood of political repression, but only in regard to the civil liberties restriction category, not the personal integrity category. This finding contradicts Apodaca’s earlier study of the seven-year period but fits with her longer study. However, contrary to Apodaca, they find that portfolio investment decreases the odds of repression of personal integrity rights but has no effect on civil liberties restrictions. They also find that foreign debt increases the repression of civil liberties restrictions but has no effect on personal integrity rights. Ultimately, these mixed results suggest that it is still premature to draw firm conclusions about the effect of foreign investment.

      International Treaties

      Most empirical studies of state compliance with international human rights treaty obligations focus on the state’s provision or protection of the guaranteed rights embedded in the document. The bulk of the empirical compliance literature, while grounded in rich theoretical debate concerning the influence of human rights treaties, has largely been limited to tests of whether being a state party produces a positive or negative effect, when controlling for a variety of factors. It does not enable us to determine which of the mechanisms that are hypothesized to be at work are actually operative. Realist theory views treaty commitments as cheap talk and therefore predicts no effect or perhaps even a negative effect. Rationalist theory does not provide as clear an expectation, but because of the lack of direct benefits from compliance and the weak enforcement mechanisms that make noncompliance relatively costless (except, possibly, in terms of reputation), treaties would be expected to have a weak effect at best. The decoupling effect posited by the world society approach would predict that we would observe no direct effect and a negative effect over time. Thus, three theories predict little or no effect or even a negative effect. The expectations of the domestic institutions approach would be conditional, expecting better human rights, but only in democratic regimes or regimes with effective legal institutions. The normative perspectives, however, would predict compliance due to norm diffusion and the effect of transnational human rights networks, but perhaps would make the expectations contingent upon the strength of the networks (Neumayer 2005).

      Empirical evidence of the influence of participation in an international human rights treaty has been mixed. For example, Keith (1999) finds no effect from the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) on personal integrity rights or civil rights and liberties, unless controlling for state derogations. Hathaway (2002) finds that most treaties within the human rights regime do not significantly affect human rights behavior, and that participation in some of the treaties, such as the Genocide Convention and the Convention Against Torture (CAT), produces negative effects, a result that is confirmed by Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui (2005) in regard to a wide range of treaties. On the other hand, the two most exhaustive compliance studies (Landman 2005 and Simmons 2009) found consistent evidence of an association between rights behavior and state commitment to a variety of treaties within the international human rights regime. Landman finds that commitment to the ICCPR and the CAT, even while controlling СКАЧАТЬ