Conclusion: Human Rights Treaties (Sometimes) Protect Rights

This chapter highlights the conclusions and contributions of theresearch: obligation to international law can constrain leaders from violating human rights-and encourage potential dissidents to revolt against their governments. The argument that human rights treaties "work" is contrary to the explanations of a wide variety of scholars who maintain that the international human rights regime has been an abject failure. Although scholars have found evidence that domestic institutions can lead to decreased repression, there has been little support for the argument that international institutions do so.In contrast, this book finds that-if international law creates even the smallest shift in assumptions over domestic consequences for repressive authorities-these effects can yield a substantively meaningful reduction in rights violations when leaders have significant stakes in domestic conflicts.

Substantive Empirical Results: Government Repression

This chapter utilizes the treatment models described in Chapter 4 to estimate the effects of a treaty on both obligated and unobligated countries. For those that are obligated to the terms of an HRT, it estimates the effect of the treaty on government repression relative to the counterfactual of how that country would have repressed if it were not treaty-obligated. For countries that are not obligated to a given HRT in each year, it estimates the effect of a counterfactual treaty commitment on government repression relative to repression that occurred absent the treaty obligation. By comparing each government's level of repression under its observed treaty commitment status and level of repression that it would have experienced under a counterfactual treaty-obligation condition, statistical models estimate the effect of international human rights law on various government violations of human rights.

Empirical Implications of Treaty Effects on Conflict

This chapter explores the model presented in Chapter 2 to learn when and how treaties affect repression and dissent. What conflict behaviors would the leader and dissidents choose if they were not obligated under an HRT? How do these behaviors change as domestic government and leader characteristics change? The chapter compares those expectations to how the same leader and the same dissidents under the same domestic conditions would act if the country were instead obligated to international human rights law. It concludes by considering how the expectations of these conflict outcomes affect the leader's propensity to commit to an international human rights treaty in the first place.

Do Human Rights Treaties Protect Rights?

Common belief is that international human rights treaties have little to no influence on human rights practices. Yet decisions to comply with rights obligations are directly tied to conflicts with civilians over policies; compliance with international human rights law is a function of contention. To know whether and when human rights treaties will effectively constrain government repression, we must understand the context of dissent faced by the government. Most scholars studying human rights treaties focus on the extent to which authorities have the opportunity to repress. Yet, as with any potential legal violation, opportunity without the motive to misbehave yields no crime. Popular challenges and the threat they represent to a government's hold on policies and power constitute the state's primary motive to repress. To determine whether international human rights treaties can meaningfully influence a government's human rights behaviors, we first consider the incentives that motivate leaders to repress.

Substantive Empirical Results: Mobilized Dissent

This chapter utilizes the treatment models described in Chapter 4 to estimate the effects of a treaty on both treaty-obligated and -unobligated countries. It examines first the probability that a government will (or will not) be obligated to an international human rights treaty and then the effect the treaty has (or would have) on mobilized dissent on the two samples of countries. Like those for government repression presented in Chapter 5, the models have complicated error correlations, interaction terms, and observable variables, making interpretation of the statistical estimates on their own quite unintuitive. Therefore, the focus is on presenting the substantive results of these estimates.

A Model of Conflict and Constraint

This chapterdescribes a model of conflict between dissidents and the government under some potential for domestic legal consequences for rights violations. Governments decide whether to obligate themselves to international law in expectation of domestic conflicts over policy and the potentiality of dissent and the motive to repress. This chapter explains the scholarship underpinning the formal model and the logic that produces the insights of the following chapter. How does the leader balance the increased probability of paying costs associated with HRTs against the incentives to repress citizens who might challenge policies? Does the population respond differently to leaders who have adopted HRTs than those who have not committed themselves under international law? Under what conditions do human rights treaties alter the conflict behaviors of these actors?

Analyzing the Effect of Treaties on Repression and Dissent

This chapter shifts from a theoretical understanding of the relationships between institutions and political behavior to an empirical one, using observed data to empirically examine the implications of our theory. It begins with a theory of measurement, translating the theoretical concepts into measures that are observable and quantifiable. It then discusses what the structural assumptions of the theoretical model imply for an empirical approach to assess the hypotheses. The empirical strategy is oriented around answering a simple question that is unanswerable without the tools of social science: How would government repression and mobilized dissent activity differ if the same country could simultaneously obligate itself and fail to obligate itself under a human rights treaty?