International Organizations and Naming and Shaming: Does the International Monetary Fund Care about the Human Rights Reputation of Its Client?

Does a country’s abuse of human rights influence its ability to get a loan from the International Monetary Fund? We examine whether human rights conditions matter for the likelihood that a country participates in an International Monetary Fund program. We argue that human rights conditions are unlikely to be enough by themselves to influence International Monetary Fund decision-making; there are simply too many countries with poor human rights conditions that are under economic distress. Instead, it is the publicity and information that human rights organizations provide about countries that reduce the likelihood of International Monetary Fund program participation. We test the implications of this reasoning in a global analysis from 1990 to 2009 using an accepted model of International Monetary Fund program participation. We find much support for our hypothesis. We further demonstrate that it is those countries closer to the United States that are most likely to have human rights organization information reduce their likelihood of International Monetary Fund program participation.

Crisis in the Eye of the Beholder

This article analyzes the interaction between economic crises and partisan politics during International Monetary Fund program initiation in Latin America in the 1980s and Eastern Europe in the 1990s. The author argues that economic crises are at least in part in the eye of the beholder, and therefore policy responses reflect the interaction between crisis intensity and the government's partisan interpretation of the crisis, which in turn depends on the nature of the economic crisis and its broader regional and international environment. Using cross-country statistical evidence from the two regions, the article shows that certain types of crises, such as liquidity shortfalls, elicit similar responses across the ideological spectrum and regional contexts. By contrast, debt repayment and domestic crises are more prone to divergent ideological interpretations, but the extent of partisan divergence is context sensitive in that it occurred during the Latin American debt crisis but not in the post-communist transition.