Jacqueline H. R. DeMeritt

Delegating Death Military Intervention and Government Killing

Does military intervention affect civilian death tolls? Existing research has focused on international actors’ ability to limit ongoing slaughter but has not examined their ability to prevent the emergence or escalation of such killing. I develop a theory of government killing that accounts not only for the government’s decision to kill civilians but also for the transference of the killing order from leader to perpetrator, and for the perpetrator’s implementation of that order. Focusing on the principal–agent relationship produces new expectations about the effects of military intervention on government killing. I find that international actors are well equipped to limit civilian slaughter: intervention supporting the government decreases the likelihood that a government orders civilians killed. Intervention against the government leads to a decrease in death tolls when killing occurs. Ultimately, supportive intervention is a useful means of preventing government killing, while oppositional intervention limits its escalation once it begins.

A political economy of human rights: Oil, natural gas, and state incentives to repress1

Oil and other natural resources are linked to many undesirable outcomes, such as civil war, autocracy and lack of economic development. Using a state-centered framework for revenue extraction, we identify why oil should also be linked to another undesirable effect: repression. We argue that repression is less costly where states do not rely on their citizenry for generating revenue, so that these states are more likely than others to use indiscriminate violations of personal integrity rights as a policy tool. We test this argument using a cross-national database with a variety of indicators of oil and fuel rents and personal integrity violations. Across all specifications and different indicators, we find a substantive and significant relationship between a state relying on oil and the violation of personal integrity rights.

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.

The Split Population Logit (SPopLogit): Modeling Measurement Bias in Binary Data

Researchers frequently face applied situations where their measurement of a binary outcome suffers from bias. Social desirability bias in survey work is the most widely appreciated circumstance, but the strategic incentives of human beings similarly induce bias in many measures outside of survey research (e.g., whether the absence of an armed attack indicates a country’s satisfaction with the status quo or a calculation that the likely costs of war outweigh the likely benefits). In these circumstances the data we are able to observe do not reflect the distribution we wish to observe. This study introduces a statistical model that permits researchers to model the process that produces the bias, the split population logit (SPopLogit) model. It further presents a Monte Carlo simulation that demonstrates the ffectiveness of SPopLogit, and then reanalyzes a study of sexual infidelity to illustrate the richness of the quantities of (empirical and theoretical) interest that can be estimated with the model. Stata ado files that can be used to invoke SPopLogit, as well as batch files illustrating how to simulate commonly reported quantities of interest, are available for download from the WWW. The authors close by briefly identifying just a few of the many types of research projects that will benefit from abandoning logit and probit models in favor of SPopLogit.

Political Context and the Consequences of Naming and Shaming for Human Rights Abuse

ABSTRACT Does being named and shamed for human rights abuse influence the amount of foreign aid received by the shamed state? Recent research suggests that the impact of public censure may depend on the political relationship between donor and recipient. We argue that donors deriving a direct political benefit from the aid relationship (such as a military advantage or the satisfaction of a domestic political audience) will ignore or work against condemnation, but donors with little political interest in the recipient (who give aid for symbolic or humanitarian reasons) will punish condemned states. We also argue that the size of prior aid packages can be used as a holistic measure of the donor’s political interest in the aid relationship because mutually beneficial aid packages are subject to a bargaining process that favors recipients with more to offer. We find that condemnation for human rights abuse by the United Nations is associated with lower bilateral aid levels among states that previously received small aid package, and with equal or higher bilateral aid to states already receiving a great deal of aid. The source of shaming also matters: We find that public shaming by human rights NGOs is not associated with decreased aggregate bilateral aid.

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

Female Participation and Civil War Relapse

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

Testing for Interaction in Binary Logit and Probit Models: Is a Product Term Essential?

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?

International Organizations and Government Killing: Does Naming and Shaming Save Lives?

A large literature demonstrates that civil war is recurrent: States that have already experienced such conflict tend to relapse back into war. How might this ‘conflict trap’ be escaped? We answer this question with a focus on gender. Women tend to exist at the margins of society, and postwar society often perpetuates prewar values. Yet this continuity is not inevitable. We argue that the end of a civil war opens a window of opportunity through which women may increasingly participate in society, economics, and politics. Given womens preference for peace and aversion to political violence, we expect this increased participation to reduce the risk of relapse to civil war. Large-N analyses support our argument, and in particular suggest that increases in female literacy and parliamentary representation reduce the risk of relapse.