Democratic presidential elections and human rights: does a runoff round reduce repression?

Holzer, Joshua

doi:10.1080/13642987.2018.1499622

Cited by 8 publications

(13 citation statements)

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“…As such, following the trend of more recent human rights studies (e.g. [ 1 , 2 , 28 , 48 ]), I utilize Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland’s Democracy versus Dictatorship dataset [ 49 ] to determine what constitutes a ‘democracy’. Per their classification, a regime is considered to be a ‘democracy’ when the president is elected, the legislature is elected, there is more than one party competing in elections, and an alternation under identical electoral rules has taken place ([ 49 ]: 69).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As such, scholars that employ one of these indices as their dependent variable often report analogous estimations using the alternate index as a robustness check (e.g. [ 48 , 57 – 59 ]). In order to aid in comparability to the CIRI Index , I have followed the literature’s trend by inverting PTS scores, such that higher scores now indicate greater government respect for physical integrity rights.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As such, I follow Hafner-Burton ([ 87 ]: 615) in including a series of “binary indicators measuring a state’s previous level of repression…to account for dependence across the categories of the dependent variable over time”; this particular technique has since been used in many other human rights-related studies (e.g. [ 48 , 73 , 86 , 88 ]). Because these binary “variables are included for diagnostic rather than substantive reasons and given the large number of them,” like others, I do not report their estimates when discussing my findings ([ 73 ]: 298).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Indeed within the broader human rights literature, models that similarly estimate CIRI Index scores and/or PTS scores commonly rely upon the use of ordered probit regression (e.g. [1,48,57,58,68,75,88]). Table 2 shows that my copartisan justice minister variable is found to be negatively associated with both high CIRI Index scores and high PTS scores; these relationships are statistically significant at least at the 95% level.…”

Section: Model Specificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The effect of copartisan justice ministers on human rights in presidential democracies

Holzer

2020

PLoS ONE

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A body of literature suggests that states with independent courts are more likely to protect human rights. A recent article challenges this notion by arguing that when both the president and his or her justice minister share the same party-i.e., they are copartisans-that state is less likely to protect human rights, as justice ministers may value their loyalty to the president over their duty to enforce court decisions. In this article, I estimate government respect for human rights accounting for both copartisan justice ministers and an independent judiciary. In the end, I find copartisan justice ministers to be negatively associated with high government respect for human rights, even after controlling for judicial independence. Many constitutions already seek to ensure an independent judiciary, but if copartisan justice ministers increase the likelihood that governments repress, then perhaps constitutional engineers should also consider options that would reduce the likelihood that both the president and his or her justice minister share the same party.

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