Neil J. Mitchell

Economic and Political Explanations of Human Rights Violations

G OVERNMENTS organize police forces and armies to protect their citizens, build schools and hospitals to educate and care for them, and provide financial assistance for the old and unemployed. But governments also kill, torture, and imprison their citizens. This dark side of government knows no geographic, economic, ideological, or political boundary. In the Middle East, for example, Iraq has morbidly placed a welcome doormat at the entrance to its torture chamber-a place where prisoners are burned with cigarettes and electric hot plates, where electric shocks are administered to them, and where they are hanged from the ceiling. In Central America, the government of Guatemala tolerates the torture and killing of three church workers who were assisting refugees. In Africa, the Cameroons allows eight prisoners to die of malnutrition; South Africa, through its policy of apartheid, systematically violates the rights of its nonwhite citizens. In Asia, Burmese army units operating in Karen state use local civilians as minesweepers. In Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union confines dissenters to psychiatric hospitals. In Western Europe, the residents of Northern Ireland are subjected to trials that fail to conform to international standards, and civilians are shot by the security forces. The list goes on. Unfortunately, this type of governmental behavior is-even in the late 20th century-a dismal characteristic of contemporary politics. Most of the worlds countries hold some prisoners of conscience or detain po-

Disaggregating and Explaining Corporate Political Activity: Domestic and Foreign Corporations in National Politics

Corporate political activity is usually operationalized and analyzed as financial contributions to candidates or political parties through political action committees (PACs). Very little attention has been paid to other dimensions, such as lobbying, in a systematic way. On a theoretical level we address the issue of how to conceive of PAC contributions, lobbying, and other corporate activities, such as charitable giving, in terms of the strategic behavior of corporations and the implications of “foreignness” for the different types of corporate political activity. On an empirical level we examine the political activities of Fortune 500 firms, along with an oversampling of U.S. affiliates of large foreign investors for the 1987–88 election cycle.

Human Rights Violations, Umbrella Concepts, and Empirical Analysis

In this research note, the authors seek to demonstraten conceptually and empirically that the unidimensional treatment ofn human rights violations, which is the standard approach found inn the literature, confounds two important underlying components ofn the concept. They argue that the disaggregation of umbrellan concepts like human rights violations is an important step in then research process and that it offers significant theoretical andn empirical benefits. The specific implications of this conceptualn argument for the measurement of human rights violations are drawnn out through an empirical analysis of the standard composite scalen in terms of its two underlying components. Future research needsn to recognize the distortions and information loss produced byn unidimensional treatment of the concept and the benefits ofn disaggregating human rights violations into its importantn components.

The Determinants of Domestic and Foreign Corporate Political Activity

Corporate political action committees (PACs) are the focus of much research on corporate political activity Political scientists, economists, and sociologists have explored the determinants of PAC formation and PAC spending by advancing and to some extent testing hypotheses concerning the size of corporations, the regulation of industries, government procurement, social connections, and corporate cultures. Progress has been made in sorting through these hypotheses, although the amount of explained variance remains relatively modest. We define the dependent variable in three ways: the decision to form a PAC, the amount to be contributed, and the number of candidates to be supported. With data largely drawn from Fortune 500 companies for the 1987-1988 election cycle, improved firm-level measures of regulation, and the inclusion of political as well as economic factors influencing corporate decision-making, we develop and provide substantial support for a politically constrained, profit-maximizing model of corporate political activity.

Is U.S. Aid Really Linked to Human Rights in Latin America

In their recent article on U.S. foreign assistance to Latin America, Cingranelli and Pasquarello (i985) report that human rights considerations have become a more important determinant of the distribution of U.S. foreign aid in this region during the same period that U.S. dominance has been severely threatened (p. 562). While such a conclusion is normatively appealing and applies more to economic assistance than to military aid, it stands in sharp contrast to the results reported by Carleton and Stohl (i985), Schoultz (X98i), Chomsky and Herman (1979), and to the expected priorities of the Reagan administration. Cingranelli and Pasquarello draw attention to the distinctive character of their results and defend them. They point to their research design which employed a systematic measure of human rights and which simultaneously evaluated several alternative explanations for U.S. foreign aid policy. Despite the evident rigor of their research, several important problems raise doubts about their major conclusion. One involves the decision on what Latin American states to include in the analysis; another involves the operationalization of human rights. As we shall show, reanalysis of the data with a different design decision undermines confidence in their results for the positive relationship between respect for human rights within Latin American countries and the level of economic assistance. First of all, Cingranelli and Pasquarello (1985) decided to exclude El Salvador from their analysis, even though El Salvador received approximately 27 percent of all U.S. bilateral aid for FY i982 to Latin America (the year of their analysis) in order to counter a severe threat to U.S. dominance. They justified this decision on the grounds that the inclusion of El Salvador . . . would have distorted the findings. The more general patterns of relationships emerged only after El Salvador was removed from the sample. In this way, Cingranelli and Pasquarello argued, We are, in effect, focusing on more routine decisions affecting the distribution of U.S. foreign aid among Latin American nations (P545). The obvious difficulty with such a research design decision is: What are

Opportunity, Democracy, and the Exchange of Political Violence: A Subnational Analysis of Conflict in Nepal

With more than 12,000 deaths in nine years, a homegrown Maoist insurgency, reinforced by ethnic and socioeconomic cleavages, has resulted in high levels of political violence and human rights violations in Nepal. With fresh district-level data and drawing on theoretical insights from both the conflict and human rights literatures, research that has relied primarily on cross-national comparisons, the authors develop and test hypotheses using a subnational research design. They find an exchange of violence between government and opposition forces that depends on the political and geographical opportunities for violence. Their findings contribute new evidence for the importance of geography but also suggest that democracy and social capital influence the selection of violence by both government and opposition.

The Determinants of Direct Corporate Lobbying in the European Union

Whereas research on corporate lobbying in the USA has produced a set of robust findings, less is known about the determinants of business political action in other policy arenas and beyond the nation-state. In particular, we do not know how well the standard profit-seeking model of firm political activity travels. The article examines this issue with an analysis of business lobbying in the EU that reflects tactical adaptation to lobbying at the supranational level. Using data on 2000 large companies, we show that a modified profit-seeking model of corporate political behaviour is generalizable to corporate lobbying in Brussels. By contrast, theories emphasizing nationally distinct types of interest intermediation find little support in the data.

Comparing nations and states - Human rights and democracy in India

Democracy and the protection of human rights generally go together, but not in India. India is an outlier in the cross-national research that aims to explain human rights performance. Using state-level subnational data and drawing on the approaches pioneered at the cross-national level, the authors examine the reasons for the outlier status. Their findings suggest that the aggregate whole-nation human rights and democracy scores misrepresent the political experience of much of India. The authors find that participation, political parties, and the level and nature of opposition threat help us understand the incidence of human rights violations within India.

The Logic of Transnational Action: The Good Corporation and the Global Compact

This article examines corporate participation in the UN Global Compact programme. Using data on the worlds 2,000 largest companies, we address the question of why companies voluntarily assume the programmes responsibilities and promote the rights of ‘global citizenship’. Our analytic approach is to view transnational corporate political behaviour as a result of firm-level decisions shaped by country-level variation in political audience effects. Drawing on earlier research on more conventional forms of corporate political activity, we expect factors influential in the standard model of firm political activity to determine participation in the Global Compact. In addition, we argue that this highly visible, less instrumental dimension of a firms political behaviour is driven by efforts to build a good environmental and human rights reputation with its audience of external actors. The importance of environmental and human rights concerns depends on the substance of the firms business activities, the availability of investment and ‘exit’ options, and the home audiences bias towards the UN and human and environmental rights. We find support for political factors as well as firm and industry-level characteristics influencing the decision to participate in the Global Compact.

Foreign and Domestic Policy Belief Structures in the U.S. and British Publics

Scholars have made little progress in exploring the degree to which research on belief structures among Americans may be generalizable to other political systems and geopolitical contexts. The distribution and structure of mass beliefs related to nuclear security, missile defenses, and nuclear energy issues in the United States and Great Britain are analyzed using data from telephone surveys simultaneously administered in both countries. In foreign and domestic areas, the British and American belief systems vary chiefly in the central tendencies of the beliefs held but not in the structural relationships among those beliefs. Findings provide evidence for a hierarchical model of policy beliefs with differential adjustments based on situational conditions, but also raise questions about the kinds of conditions—geopolitical and institutional—that give rise to these similarities.