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Testing for Negative Spillovers: Is Promoting Human Rights Really Part of the “Problem”?
International Organization ( IF 5.754 ) Pub Date : 2021-01-25 , DOI: 10.1017/s0020818320000661
Anton Strezhnev , Judith G. Kelley , Beth A. Simmons

The international community often seeks to promote political reforms in recalcitrant states. Recently, some scholars have argued that, rather than helping, international law and advocacy create new problems because they have negative spillovers that increase rights violations. We review three mechanisms for such spillovers: backlash, trade-offs, and counteraction and concentrate on the last of these. Some researchers assert that governments sometimes “counteract” international human rights pressures by strategically substituting violations in adjacent areas that are either not targeted or are harder to monitor. However, most such research shows only that both outcomes correlate with an intervention—the targeted positively and the spillover negatively. The burden of proof, however, should be as rigorous as those for studies of first-order policy consequences. We show that these correlations by themselves are insufficient to demonstrate counteraction outside of the narrow case where the intervention is assumed to have no direct effect on the spillover, a situation akin to having a valid instrumental variable design. We revisit two prominent findings and show that the evidence for the counteraction claim is weak in both cases. The article contributes methodologically to the study of negative spillovers in general by proposing mediation and sensitivity analysis within an instrumental variables framework for assessing such arguments. It revisits important prior findings that claim negative consequences to human rights law and/or advocacy, and raises critical normative questions regarding how we empirically evaluate hypotheses about causal mechanisms.

中文翻译:

测试负面溢出效应:促进人权真的是“问题”的一部分吗?

国际社会经常寻求促进顽固国家的政治改革。最近,一些学者认为,国际法和倡导不仅没有帮助,反而会产生新的问题,因为它们具有负面溢出效应,会增加侵犯权利的行为。我们回顾了这种溢出效应的三种机制:反弹、权衡和反作用,并集中讨论最后一个。一些研究人员断言,政府有时会通过战略性地替代邻近地区的侵权行为来“抵消”国际人权压力,这些侵权行为要么不是目标,要么更难监测。然而,大多数此类研究仅表明,两种结果都与干预相关——目标是积极的,而溢出是消极的。然而,举证责任,应该与研究一阶政策后果的研究一样严格。我们表明,这些相关性本身不足以证明在假设干预对溢出没有直接影响的狭隘情况之外的抵消作用,这种情况类似于具有有效的工具变量设计。我们重新审视了两个突出的发现,并表明在这两种情况下,反诉主张的证据都很薄弱。本文通过在评估此类论点的工具变量框架内提出中介和敏感性分析,在方法论上对一般负面溢出效应的研究做出了贡献。它重新审视了重要的先前调查结果,这些调查结果声称对人权法和/或倡导具有负面影响,
更新日期:2021-01-25
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