Legislative Veto Players and the Effects of International Human Rights Agreements

Abstract

Do national legislatures constitute a mechanism by which commitments to international human rights treaties can be made credible? Treaty ratification can activate domestic mechanisms that make repression more costly, and the legislative opposition can enhance these mechanisms. Legislative veto players raise the cost of formalistic repressive strategies by declining to consent to legislation. Executives can still choose to rely on more costly, extralegal strategies, but these could result in severe penalties for the leader and require the leader to expend resources to hide. Especially in treaty member-states, legislatures can use other powers to also increase the cost of extralegal violations, which can further reduce repression. By using an empirical strategy that attempts to address the selection effects in treaty commitment decisions, I show that positive effects of human rights treaties increase when there are more legislative veto players.

Complying with Human Rights

“…In this connection, several authors emphasize the importance of independent domestic courts that positively influence the respect of human rights and treaty compliance (for example, Apodaca 2002;Camp Keith 2002;Conrad 2014;Conrad and Ritter 2013;Cross 1999;Lupu 2013a;Powell and Staton 2009). Similarly, Lupu (2015) shows that more legislative veto players positively influence the effects of human rights treaties. Hafner-Burton (2008 analyzes the influence of issue linkage and finds that preferential trade agreements that provide enforceable human rights standards lead to more respect of human rights than preferential trade agreements without such standards.…”

“…Beyond that, however, Lupu (2013b) includes the treaty commitment preferences of states to account for selection effects (see also Lupu 2015). Criticizing earlier work, Fariss (2014:297) argues that the negative effect of treaty ratification on compliance with human rights is due to "a systematic change in the way monitors, like Amnesty International and the US State Department, encounter and interpret information about abuses."…”

“…More recent work (for example, Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui 2005;Hathaway 2002;Hill 2010;Lupu 2015;Neumayer 2005) relies on ordered logit and probit models, which reflect more closely the likely data-generating process. In studies of compliance, however, two additional problems loom rather large.…”

“…Previous work relying on ordered logit or probit models simply included a lagged dependent variable (thus assuming this variable to be continuous) as additional independent variable to control for time dependence (for example, Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui 2005;Hathaway 2002;Lupu 2015;Neumayer 2005). 4 Unfortunately, this assumes a rather inconsistent data-generating process, as the same variable is simultaneously considered to be ordinal and continuous.…”

“…14 For this variable we employed Weidmann, Kuse, and Gleditsch's (2012) cshapes package to determine for each year in our analysis all the countries' neighbors (that is, countries having territory at a distance of less than 100 kilometers) and then determined among these neighbors the proportion having ratified the CAT (for a related strategy, see Lupu 2015). 10 http://treaties.un.org/Pages/Treaties.aspx?id=4&subid=A&lang=en 11 http://www.oas.org/juridico/english/sigs/a-51.html 12 http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/Commun/ChercheSig.asp?NT=126&CM=&DF=&CL=ENG 13 We also assessed whether an interaction between the political regime and the ratification decision affect the results reported.…”