The perils of plurality rule and the major(itarian) effect of cabinet composition on human rights in presidential democracies

Abstract

I argue that when presidents are able (or forced) to cobble together broad-based coalitions to win an absolute majority, their administrations are less likely (and less able) to violate human rights, in comparison to presidential administrations whose victories are the result of a narrow plurality. Consistent with this argument, I find cabinets comprised of a higher percentage of individuals from parties other than that of the president to be associated with greater government respect for human rights. Additionally, I find that in the years after a presidential election won by an absolute majority, states are more likely to experience an increase in government respect for human rights, in comparison to the years after a presidential election won by a mere plurality. Utilizing an original dataset of cabinet composition for 35 presidential democracies spanning from 2001 to 2011, this study concludes that it may prudent for non-majoritarian systems to consider adopting a mandatory majority rule so to encourage the types of conciliatory alliances that appear to promote high human rights respect.

Reevaluating the presidential runoff rule: Does a provision promote the protection of human rights?

“…With Models 1, 2, and 3 in Table 5, I test the final three premises that make up the right-side of Table 1 using the same variables that were used in Tables 2, 3 and 4. Recall that these final three premises seek to replicate the findings of two recent papers [5, 6]; the results that Models 1, 2, and 3 report are consistent with the results reported in these papers.…”

“…In order to test the premises that provide the basis of my theoretical argument, I use three variables that I previously constructed for my earlier works [5, 6]). For the first variable—which is the president’s distance from the median voter —values closer to ‘0’ indicate that the president and the median voter are ideologically similar, while values closer to ‘1’ suggest that the president is ideological distant from the median voter.…”

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

“…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).…”

“…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 ]).…”

“…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.…”