Government Respect for Gendered Rights: The Effect of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women on Women’s Rights Outcomes, 1981-2004¹

Abstract

Using two-stage least-squares regression models, I analyze the effect of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) on rated levels of respect for women's rights. The results show that CEDAW has a strong positive effect on women's political rights, no effect on economic rights, and a partially negative effect on social rights. Detailed analyses of political outcomes reveal that CEDAW membership was associated with an increase in the share of women in national parliaments but had no effect on the likelihood that governments adopted legislative quotas guaranteeing female representation in parliament. CEDAW was also more effective for some kinds of countries than others. Post-ratification improvements were particularly strong in democratic countries and countries with extensive linkages to women-focused international organizations, but CEDAW proved ineffective in Muslim polities and societies. The paper evaluates the implications of these findings and proposes new avenues for research.

Women’s rights INGO shaming and the government respect for women’s rights

“…Interestingly, Cole (2012) finds a negative relationship between women's social, political, and economic rights and WRO presence within a state: as more organizations are active within the country, government respect for these rights decreases. Cole (2012) dismisses this relationship as WROs leading to an over-reporting of women's rights issues. It is important to point out that all of these studies focus on the overall presence of WROs within the country rather than assessing the nature and intensity of public targetings by these groups.…”

“…While we recognize the difficulties that come with the quantification of a term as nebulous as women's rights, the CIRI Human Rights Dataset offers a reliable assessment of women's socio-economic and political status, and it is well-suited for the purpose of this manuscript: exploring whether WRO shaming has any influence on government respect for women's internationally recognized rights. 4 The CIRI dataset provides a comprehensive temporal and cross-national coverage of women's rights and has been used by several other scholars in a manner similar to the one proposed in this study (e.g., Neumayer and De Soysa 2007;Richards and Gelleny 2007;Hill 2010;Peksen 2011;Cole 2012).…”

“…We include a WRO Presence variable to account for the presence of women's rights organizations, like previous research on various women's rights outcomes has done (Simmons 2009;Bush 2011;Yoo 2011;Cole 2012) and because research on human rights INGO shaming has found that the presence of organizations within a country makes shaming more likely (Meernik et al 2012). This variable accounts for the number of WROs in a country in a given year (Cole 2012). As mentioned, WRO presence may be associated with more long-term strategies of public awareness and education; it is not necessarily associated with bold shaming directed against key actors for immediate response.…”

“…On the other hand, given the historical tendencies of gender-based exclusion from the public sphere, perhaps critical moves are necessary to give women's rights issues a "voice" for government action (Osirim 2001). 1 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).…”

“…First, although many case studies have shown that WROs can be powerful conduits for both getting issues on the international agenda and improving the positions of women (Afsharipour 1999;Osirim 2001;Friedman 2003;Avdeveya 2007), the extant cross-national quantitative literature often paints a dismal picture, finding that WROs, at best, only improve women's rights in very narrow policy domains (Paxton et al 2006;Cherif 2010;Simmons 2009;Cole 2012;Htun and Weldon 2012). In this paper, we develop a theoretical argument that explains this empirical disparity: if quantitative tests only focus on the overall presence of WROs and not their use of shaming or other strategies, it is unlikely that any strong relationship to improvements in women's status will be found.…”