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Periodically, we look at academic research that is not on the Korean peninsula but has relevance to it. Richard Nielson (MIT) and Beth Simmons (Harvard) have published an interesting piece in the most recent issue of International Studies Quarterly called “Rewards for Ratification: Payoffs for Participating in the International Human Rights Regime.” Since Oona Hathaway’s groundbreaking 2002 piece, "Do Human Rights Treaties Make a Difference," scholars of international human rights have been doing cross-national panel regressions on the causes and consequences of the emerging human rights regime. The typical set-up is to use ratifications of conventions as either the outcome to be explained or the cause of some outcome, including most obviously whether human rights actually improve. Among the skeptics on the latter point is my colleague Emilie Hafner-Burton, whose excellent book on Making Human Rights a Reality we have reviewed here. She argues treaty ratification has little effect.
The basic design of the Nielsen-Simmons study is simple: they test for whether signing one or all of four human rights conventions yields tangible rewards. The conventions are the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, its first optional protocol, the Convention Against Torture, and its 22nd Article (the 22nd article binds the state signatory to recognize “the competence of the Committee to receive and consider communications from or on behalf of individuals subject to its jurisdiction who claim to be victims of a violation…” In effect, it creates personal standing before the Committee.) Nielsen and Simmons operationalize “rewards” as foreign aid flows, ratification of free trade agreements and signing of bilateral investment treaties. But in addition, they consider intangible rewards by investigating whether European Union, US and Amnesty International press releases contain explicit praise, positive or negative language or were followed by official state visits (to give some sense of the scope of the data, this involved coding over 34,000 EU press releases.)
The findings: there is little material or intangible benefit to accession. The one small exception is that there is a substantively modest effect on the likelihood of signing a free trade agreement between two countries in the six year window following one of them acceding to these treaties. But all of the other material measures show little or no effect; of particular interest is the null finding on aid. More surprising is that they find few examples of the EU praising ratifiers (16 cases out of 34,000 releases), absolutely no evidence that the United States does so or that Amnesty International lightens up on countries that ratify.
Of course if you believe that ratification of these treaties has little substantive effect on actual human rights performance—that violators will sign and compliers often maintain reservations—then the finding should not surprise. But it does raise important policy puzzles such as whether the international community is not providing adequate positive incentives for improving human rights. Given their highly instrumental approach to engagement, let’s hope our North Korean colleagues are not reading International Studies Quarterly.
Other Academic Sources Posts.
This series is designed to showcase academic social science work broadly relevant to the Korean peninsula even if not directly on it. Nominations are always welcome.
Faisal Z. Ahmed on the effect of remittances on the longevity of autocracies.
Jessica Weeks on types of autocracy and propensity for conflict.
Levitsky and Way on the durability of authoritarian regimes
Emilie Hafner-Burton on the international human rights regime
Kathryn Sikkink's Justice Cascade
Aleman and Woods on Travel Restrictions
