Courtenay R. Conrad

Treaties, Tenure, and Torture: The Conflicting Domestic Effects of International Law

International human rights treaties are argued to increase both the likelihood of domestic mobilized dissent and judicial constraint. These pressures pull leaders in conflicting directions: mobilized challenges undermine a leader’s position in power, increasing incentives to repress; courts raise the probability of litigation, decreasing incentives to repress. We argue authorities balance these pressures based on their job security. Politically insecure leaders, desperate to retain power, repress to control the destabilizing effects of dissent. Secure leaders are less likely to fall to citizen pressures, but the probability of facing an effective judiciary weighs heavily in their expected costs. Consequently, they repress less to avoid litigation. We find empirical support for the implications of our formal theory using data on commitment to the UN Convention Against Torture. Treaties have no effect on repression in states with insecure leaders but have a positive effect on rights protection in states hea...

Divergent Incentives for Dictators: Domestic Institutions and (International Promises Not to) Torture

Although they are arguably the worst violators of human rights, dictators sometimes commit to international human rights treaties like the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT) to appease their domestic opposition. Importantly, however, executives facing effective judiciaries must anticipate ex post costs that can arise when international treaties are likely to be enforced domestically. This suggests that one domestic institution—a political opposition party—may provide a dictator with incentives to commit to international human rights treaties and violate human rights, while another—an effective domestic judiciary—may constrain the dictator’s ability to violate human rights and incentivize him to avoid international commitment. How do dictators make choices about commitment to human rights law and respect for human rights when they face conflicting domestic incentives? Furthermore, how do these divergent incentives affect compliance when dictators do commit to international treaties? In this article, I argue that the domestic incentives dictators face to support the CAT and engage in torture are moderated in countries with effective domestic judiciaries.

Preventing and Responding to Dissent: The Observational Challenges of Explaining Strategic Repression

Although scholarly consensus suggests that dissent causes repression, the behaviors are endogenous: governments and dissidents act in expectation of each other’s behavior. Empirical studies have not accounted well for this endogeneity. We argue that preventive aspects of repression meaningfully affect the relationship between observed dissent and repression. When governments use preventive repression, the best response to dissent that does occur is unclear; observed dissent does not meaningfully predict responsive repression. By contrast, governments that do not engage in ex ante repression will be more likely to do it ex post. We follow U.S. voting scholarship and propose a new instrument to model the endogeneity: rainfall. We couple rainfall data in African provinces and U.S. states with data on dissent and repression and find that dissent fails to have a significant effect on responsive repression in states that engage in preventive repression.

Constrained by the bank and the ballot

Why does the discovery of oil lead to increased government repression in some countries and not others? Why is there variance in the extent to which democracy constrains state violations of human rights? We assume that an executive’s propensity to use violence against citizens is a function of the extent to which he is dependent on his citizenry. Executives can be dependent on their citizenry in two ways: (1) at the bank for financial resources, and (2) at the ballot box for political support. We argue that these considerations jointly influence executive decisions to engage in state repression, and consequently, observed human rights abuse. Using a dataset of 146 countries from 1981 to 2011, we find that democratic institutions have a moderating effect on the positive relationship between unearned revenues and human rights violations. Decreased reliance on citizens for revenue does not weaken and may actually strengthen the pacifying effect of democratic institutions on state terror. Our results suggest that pursuing democracy is a useful way to reduce political violence, both directly and indirectly, even in the presence of a resource curse. Furthermore, the discovery of oil and other unearned revenues is unlikely to undermine the positive relationship between democratic institutions and domestic protections for human rights.

Torture Allegations as Events Data: Introducing the Ill-Treatment and Torture (ITT) Specific Allegation Data

The Ill-Treatment and Torture (ITT) Data Collection Project uses content analysis to measure a number of variables on more than 15,000 public allegations of government ill-treatment and torture made by Amnesty International (AI) from 1995 to 2005. The ITT specific allegation (SA) event data use the torture allegation as the unit of observation, thus permitting users to manipulate them for a wide variety of purposes. In this article, we introduce the ITT SA data. We first describe the key variables in the SA data and report a number of bivariate descriptive statistics to illustrate some of the research questions that might be usefully investigated with the data. We then discuss how we believe the ITT SA data can be used to study not only AI’s naming and shaming behavior, but also states’ (lack of) compliance with the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT). We conclude with an empirical analysis using the SA data that investigates the effect of domestic political institutions on formal complaints, investigations, and adjudication of torture allegations. We show that legislative checks are positively associated with complaints, investigations, and trials; elections and freedom of speech are positively associated with investigations and trials; and powerful judiciaries are associated only with investigations.

Torture and the limits of democratic institutions

What are the limits of democracy’s positive influence on human rights? In this article, we argue that contested elections and powerful courts provide leaders with different incentives with regard to hiding torture. Because government torture is generally targeted at individuals that voters find threatening, institutions that reflect public opinion – like electoral contestation – are associated with higher levels of government abuse that leave scars on the victim’s body. Other institutions – like powerful courts – protect the rights of political minorities. Leaders in countries with powerful courts prefer plausible deniability of rights violations and consequently employ higher levels of clean torture, which leaves no scars. We test our hypotheses using data from the Ill-Treatment and Torture (ITT) Data Collection Project that distinguish between Amnesty International (AI) allegations of scarring and clean torture. We employ an undercount negative binomial that accounts for AI’s (in)ability to obtain information about torture. The model assumes that some incidents of torture go unreported and allows the extent of underreporting to vary across countries/years. Estimates from the model yield considerable statistical and substantive support for our hypotheses.

Unintended Consequences: The Effect of Advocacy to End Torture on Empowerment Rights Violations

In a globalized world replete with international organizations (IOs), nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and 24-hour news media, human rights abuses like torture are increasingly difficult to hide. Because there are few international mechanisms to address violations of human rights law (Neumayer 2005), actors like IOs and NGOs engage in naming and shaming campaigns with the hope that negative publicity pressures repressive regimes to better respect human rights. A great deal of resources support these international advocacy campaigns. Between April 2009 and March 2010, Amnesty International (AI) spent

What Stops the Torture

21,451,000—about 98 percent of its expended resources—on activities in furtherance of the group’s objectives, including research into rights violations and advocacy campaigns publicizing the results of that research (AI 2010, 8, 13). 1 And in its 2010–2011 spending plan, the United Nations (UN) earmarked

Measuring government duration and stability in Central Eastern European democracies

24,520,400—5.9 percent of its operating budget—for human rights and humanitarian affairs (United Nations 2010, 2). 2 Clearly, international advocacy organizations invest resources in the naming and shaming of human rights violations like torture. But does it work?