The Cost of Commitment

The Puzzle of Abu Ghraib: Are Democratic Institutions a Palliative or Panacea?

“…States with strong judiciaries, on the other hand, will decline to ratify for fear that their ability to use coercion during interrogation will be constrained by domestic courts. 7 Both Hathaway (2003Hathaway ( , 2004 and Powell and Staton (2007) thus argue, and produce evidence to support their arguments, that treaties have no effect because those states that can ignore them are considerably more likely to sign, and those that cannot ignore their treaty commitments are considerably less likely to sign. This work also suggests that the reported relationship between democracy and torture is based on a mis-specification (i.e., was produced by the failure to appreciate the selection effect).…”

“…Following related work by Hathaway (2003Hathaway ( , 2004, Powell and Staton (2007) study compliance with the Convention Against Torture and report that the effectiveness of a state's judiciary is a key variable for understanding the intersection of ratification and compliance. They argue 4 Cingranelli and Richards (1999b) is an early publication using disaggregated physical integrity rights data from what became the CIRI data set (discussed below), but while they examine the global trend in torture during the post cold war period, they only report the correlates of political imprisonment.…”

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

“…Our specification allows the leader to choose a level of r 5 0, which ensures the group receives its demands m mþ0 ¼ 1 . That being said, the theory primarily speaks to situations in which repression is a possible choice for the leader, which is most often the case.11 For scholarship considering normative, material, and strategic incentives to commit to IHRTs, seeHathaway 2003;Hollyer and Rosendorff 2011;Moravcsik 2000;and Vreeland 2008. …”

Divergent Incentives for Dictators

“…International organization scholars are increasingly synthesizing their finding with the literature on political violence and institutions (Huntington 1968;Gurr 1986a;Lichbach 1987;Linz 1988;Davenport 1996Davenport , 1997Davenport , 2007cGartner and Regan 1996;Davenport and Armstrong 2004) and arguing that commitment to and compliance with international human rights treaties are conditional upon domestic political institutions (Poe and Tate 1994;Poe, Tate, and Keith 1999;Hathaway 2003;von Stein 2005;Davenport and Armstrong 2004;Bueno de Mesquita et al 2005;Davenport 2007b;Powell and Staton 2009;Vreeland 2008;Simmons 2009;Conrad and Moore 2010). This article adds to this literature by looking not only at how domestic political institutions incentivize executive actions but also at how domestic political institutions interact with one another to produce political outcomes.…”