Participation in international human rights NGOs: The effect of democracy and state capacity

Participation in international human rights NGOs: The effect of democracy and state capacity

Social Science Research 41 (2012) 1254–1274 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Social Science Research journal homepage: www.elsevie...

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Social Science Research 41 (2012) 1254–1274

Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect

Social Science Research journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ssresearch

Participation in international human rights NGOs: The effect of democracy and state capacity Min Zhou Department of Sociology, University of Victoria, Cornett Building A359, 3800 Finnerty Road, Victoria, BC, Canada V8P 5C2

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 15 April 2011 Revised 15 January 2012 Accepted 14 March 2012 Available online 28 March 2012 Keywords: Globalization World polity NGO Civil society State Human rights

a b s t r a c t This study examines the effect of the state on participation in human rights international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) from 1966 through 2006, using random effects negative binomial models. Civic participation in human rights INGOs is not responsive to human rights abuses of the state, but is affected by the institutional environment provided by the state. Two intertwined dimensions within the state, democracy and state capacity, are found to be important in explaining cross-national variation in this participation. Strong state capacity magnifies the effect of democracy. A strong democratic state generates the most favorable condition. A strong but authoritarian state, however, is the most unfavorable, because it has both the motive and the capacity to restrain its citizens’ global civic engagement. In contrast, an authoritarian but weak state lacks adequate capacity to intervene, and thus tolerates more participation than its strong counterpart. Over time differential participation across different types of states has not been diminished. This study reveals the role of the state in mediating between local citizens and global civil society, and develops a state-centered explanation for unequal participation in human rights INGOs across countries. Ó 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction Many global norms and worldwide models are constructed and propagated through the world polity (Boli and Thomas, 1997, 1999; Meyer et al., 1997), which is embodied in two different types of organizations: intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), whose members are states, and international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), whose members are civil society individuals (Boli and Thomas, 1999). The term ‘‘global civil society’’ has been applied to the domain of INGOs (Baker and Chandler, 2005; Florini, 2000; Wapner, 1996, 2002), in order to distinguish the two types of organizational forms. Recently a prominent feature of the world polity has caught much attention—participation in international organizations varies dramatically across countries, and national memberships in INGOs, or the global civil society, are especially unequal (Beckfield, 2003; Hughes et al., 2009; Smith and Wiest, 2005). Although recent studies have found considerable cross-national variation in INGO memberships, scholars are only beginning to explore the sources of this variation. This paper seeks to explain this cross-national variation in a particular issue field, the human rights field. One prominent feature of human rights activities is their close connection with and potential impact on the state. First, by definition, human rights are targeted at the state and most human rights abuses are done by the state (Forsythe, 1991). While individuals and certain social groups are bearers of human rights, the state is the primary actor that protects or violates human rights (Donnelly, 1998; Landman, 2006). Citizens from a country where the state seriously violates human rights have more urgent demand for human rights and more incentives to participate in global human rights activities. Therefore, human rights violations of the state may stimulate citizens’ participation in human rights INGOs, and E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected] 0049-089X/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2012.03.011

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this participation is likely to be a response to abusive behavior of the state. Second, global human rights activities seek to restrict states’ abilities to take certain actions involving their own citizens and subject states’ behavior to external scrutiny, so they are often seen as a challenge to state sovereignty (Cole, 2005; Donnelly, 1986; Forsythe, 2000; Hathaway, 2002; Moravcsik, 2000). Because all states value and carefully guard their sovereignty, there is persistent tension between human rights and the state (Simmons, 2009). Due to this distinctive characteristic of human rights, the state has potential motives and interests to intervene in its citizens’ participation in human rights INGOs. Its motive and ability in restricting this participation are likely to be shaped by the political institutions of the state. Taken together, human rights practices of the state can directly stimulate citizens’ participation in human rights INGOs, and institutional environments provided by the state have the potential to intervene in this participation. Hence, the role of the state is key to understanding civic participation in human rights INGOs. Building on the literature on human rights, neoinstitutional theory (and its related world polity theory), social movement literature, and the scholarship on the state-society relationship, I argue that citizens’ involvement in human rights INGOs is not a response to human rights practices of the state, but is shaped by specific institutional environments provided by the state. Particularly, the interaction of two key dimensions, democracy and state capacity, generates differential opportunities and constraints for this participation. To test my argument, I use a large dataset on national memberships in human rights INGOs, which includes 162 countries from 1966 through 2006. Adopting a ‘‘self-perception’’ and ‘‘self-definition’’ coding scheme, I code INGOs that include ‘‘human rights’’ in their names or primary aims as human rights INGOs. Participants in human rights INGOs are usually individuals, and a country is recorded as a ‘‘member’’ of an INGO if at least one resident of that country belongs to the INGO.1 The unit of analysis is the country. This dataset represents the most comprehensive data that have been analyzed in the study of human rights INGOs in terms of the number of countries and years covered. I discuss potential limitations of this dataset in the ‘‘Data and Methods’’ section, but it is important to point out that my data most effectively capture larger and more publicized INGOs that explicitly specialize in human rights activities. These large, publicized, and explicit human rights INGOs are arguably the most central, resource-rich, and politically influential organizations in the global human rights field, so it is important to understand participation in these organizations. This study advances the literature on participation in human rights INGOs by taking the state more seriously. The vast empirical literature generated by world polity theory has primarily focused on the effects of the world polity, which has overshadowed concern with its structure (Beckfield, 2003, 2010). Empirical research on the structure of the global civil society in a particular issue field is particularly rare. Although a few notable exceptions (e.g., Smith and Wiest, 2005; Tsutsui and Wotipka, 2004) contribute much to our understanding of civic participation in human rights INGOs, they do not focus on the role of the state. Partly due to this lack of empirical studies, there is a problematic tendency to view INGOs as truly transnational and thus free from the influence of the state (Florini, 2000; Risse-Kappen, 1995). To fill this gap, this paper examines the effects of the state on participation in human rights INGOs. It addresses these key questions: Is citizens’ participation in human rights INGOs a response to the state’s human rights violations? Can citizens connect directly with global human rights civil society, bypassing the interference from the state? What types of domestic political institutions facilitate or impede citizens’ participation in global civil society? The answers to these questions will shed light on such broad debates as the role of the state in mediating between local and global civil society, inequality in global civil society, and the institutionalization of global norms in general. 2. Participation in human rights INGOs The contemporary history of human rights goes back to the Charter of United Nations, which formally gave rise to the concept of ‘‘human rights’’ and ushered in global efforts to institutionalize human rights. The first result of these efforts was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 by the General Assembly, which covers a wide range of civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights. This document served as a springboard for the two principal international human rights treaties that were opened for signature in 1966: the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Ever since then the global institutionalization of human rights has evolved into two components—the intergovernmental treaty system and the global civil society of human rights INGOs. Recently scholars have found that human rights INGOs play an increasingly important role in promoting human rights, especially in countries which they have access to (Brysk, 2002; Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Pubantz, 2005; Risse et al., 1999; Tsutsui, 2006; Welch, 2001). These INGOs lobby, work with, and monitor governmental and international human rights agencies; they expose human rights violations to world public opinion and raise consciousness about human rights issues; they also take direct action in fighting against human rights abuses. They have already become an indispensable component in the global expansion of human rights. In order to work effectively, human rights INGOs need local participants to provide information, monitor state behavior, and carry out activities. Participation in human rights INGOs is far from universal, and cross-national variation has long been notably large (Smith et al., 1998; Steiner, 1991), however. This unequal participation across countries gives rise to ‘‘power differentials’’ (Pubantz, 2005, p. 1301) and ‘‘unequal representativeness’’ (Anheier and Katz, 2003; Anheier and Stares, 2002) within the global civil society of human rights. One of the most important sources of this inequality is the state. It remains an 1 Although participants in INGOs are individuals, conventional organizational directories document member countries instead of individual members. Hence, empirical studies on participation in INGOs usually use the country as the unit of analysis (see Beckfield, 2003, p. 406).

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unaddressed question as to (1) to what extent participation of local citizens in human rights INGOs is a direct response to the state’s human rights practices, and (2) whether this participation is facilitated or prevented by certain institutional conditions provided by the state. A wealth of theories on globalization and transnationalism have a strong tendency to view global civil society embodied in INGOs as the third force that operates in parallel with and outside of the traditional nation-state system and the capitalist global market (Florini, 2000; Keck and Sikkink, 1998). This implicit emphasis on the independent nature of global civil society leads to the neglect of domestic political institutions that may shape global civil society itself. Driven by world polity theory, many empirical studies have dealt with various effects of involvement in international organizations on state policies. Only recently have scholars realized the urgency of exploring unequal participation in the world polity. This limitation of knowledge is especially noticeable in the case of INGOs. The few pioneering studies on national participation in INGOs include Boli et al.’s (1999) brief survey of the overall INGO field and Beckfield’s (2003) research on cross-national inequality in participation in INGOs. They find that rich, core, and Western countries have more INGO ties than less developed peripheral countries. These studies focus on the overall INGO field without disaggregating it into particular issue fields. A few recent studies have just begun to investigate national participation in INGOs in particular issue fields, a couple of which have examined fields related to human rights. Tsutsui and Wotipka (2004) and Smith and Wiest (2005) are two noticeable studies on participation in human rights INGOs. They do not focus on the role of the state and also generate somewhat conflicting conclusions. While Tsutsui and Wotipka find that domestic factors have little effect on memberships in human rights INGOs, Smith and Wiest identify continuous importance of domestic political factors. Furthermore, the most recent time point in Tsutsui and Wotipka’s study is 1998, and thus it does not offer much insight into participation patterns in recent years. Smith and Wiest’s study is a cross-sectional analysis at only one time point (the year 2000). Consequently, it cannot rule out unobserved heterogeneity in its analysis and also does not tell us whether the importance of domestic political institutions has changed over time.2 Taken together, unequal participation in human rights INGOs across the globe is still an insufficiently explored topic. My empirical study is based on longitudinal data and covers relatively recent years, and more importantly, pays particular attention to the role of the state. According to the literature on human rights, the concept of human rights has a special reference to the ways in which states treat their own citizens (Donnelly, 1998; Forsythe, 1991; Landman, 2006). Global human rights activities not only impinge on state sovereignty, but also explicitly aim to restrict and change the behavior of the state. The state is a major actor and target in human rights issues, and has high stakes and direct interest in human rights activities. Hence, the nature of human rights determines that the state plays a role in civic participation in human rights INGOs. In the next section I explain why and how the state matters. 3. Importance of the state for global civic participation 3.1. Human rights practices of the state Citizens’ participation in human rights INGOs can originate in response to human rights abuses done by the state. Human rights are fundamentally political issues and aim to change the legal and political practices of the state. One needs human rights principally when they are not effectively guaranteed by the state (Donnelly, 1998; Forsythe, 1991; Landman, 2006). Citizens from rights-violating countries may demand more participation in human rights INGOs in hopes of changing state behavior. On the other hand, both world polity theory and social movement literature cast doubt on the relationship between the state’s human rights practices and citizen’s participation in human rights INGOs. Social movement literature has long realized that social problems and grievances alone do not automatically mobilize people to join a movement (McAdam et al., 1996; Tarrow, 1998; Tilly, 2003). Furthermore, world polity theory sees globally oriented INGOs as offshoots of the diffusion of world cultural models rather than indigenous responses to local problems. For instance, recent studies on global environmentalism find little relationship between environmentalist activities and local environmental degradation (Dalton, 2005; Longhofer and Schofer, 2010). Many human rights INGOs promote human rights in other countries or on a global scale, and do not limit their activities to the countries where they are based. The impetus to join human rights INGOs does not necessarily reflect domestic demand for better human rights. Accordingly, I propose two competing hypotheses regarding the effect of the state’s human rights practices on participation in human rights INGOs.

2 Also, the organizations in the two studies are not strictly limited to the human rights field, but a combination of several loosely related issue fields (see Smith and Wiest, 2005, p. 629; Tsutsui and Wotipka, 2004, p. 591–592). Smith and Wiest’s study (2005) examines a broadly defined group of social movement INGOs, which are organized around the issues of human rights, women’s rights, environmental protection, peace, economic justice or some combination of these issues. Those human rights INGOs identified by Tsutsui and Wotipka (2004) are more representative of the human right field. However, due to the lack of ‘‘human rights organizations’’ as a specific category in the Yearbook of International Organizations in earlier years, they have to change their coding scheme over time. For example, for data in 1988 they code organizations in various categories, including rights, justice, equality, discrimination, and humanity, as human rights INGOs, whereas for data in 1978 they code all organizations under such subject headings as ‘‘human’’, ‘‘rights’’, social welfare, women, trade union, religion, ethics, and morals.

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Hypothesis 1-1. The worse a country’s human rights practices, the more human rights INGOs its citizens participate in. Hypothesis 1-2. Human rights practices of the state have no effect on the number of human rights INGOs its citizens participate in. 3.2. Political institutions of the state: the democracy dimension The concept of civil society was first introduced by Hegel in Philosophy of Right (Plamenatz, 1963). Hegel, followed by other political scientists, saw civil society as a buffer against the state. In Democracy in America de Tocqueville argued that civil society provides the ultimate guarantee that the state will be unable to arrogate to itself any more power than an active citizenry is willing to grant (Bratton, 1989, p. 417; Tocqueville, 1961). Although there have always been debates about the precise definition of civil society, there is some basic consensus. Civil society is seen as consisting of civil associations that represent various individual or group interests, which work outside the state and protect these interests from the intrusion of the state (Alexander, 1998). Earlier theories mostly refer to domestic civil society, but recent waves of global integration make possible the emergence of transnational civil society. The domain of human rights INGOs is often conceptualized as a global civil society, because it possesses the defining features of civil society. The global civil society of human rights and domestic civil society share three key common features: (1) both are made up of citizens rather than states; (2) both work outside the state; (3) both advocate individual (or group) rights and interests, and protect them from the intrusion of the state. In light of these commonalities, I propose that political institutions that affect the formation and strength of domestic civil society should also influence participation in the global civil society of human rights. It is theoretically and empirically well established that state political institutions strongly affect the level of domestic civic engagement (Knoke, 1986; Paxton, 2002; Schofer and Longhofer, 2011; Skocpol et al., 2000; Wuthnow, 1991). Levels of democracy are among the most reliable predictors of cross-national variation in domestic civil association memberships (Curtis et al., 2001; Musick and Wilson, 2008; Salamon and Sokolowski, 2001; Schofer and Fourcade-Gournchas, 2001; Wuthnow, 1991). The existence of open political competition is the defining feature of democracy, and democracy is seen as ‘‘a system in which government offices are filled by contested elections’’ (Alvarez et al., 1996, p. 7). On the one hand, democratic political structures provide more institutional means and opportunities, especially freedom of association, for individual citizens to pursue civic engagement, relative to authoritarian regimes (Evans et al., 1985; Paxton, 2002; Schofer and Longhofer, 2011; Skocpol and Fiorina, 1999); on the other hand, democratic polities also legitimize civic engagement at both normative and cognitive levels, making participation in civic associations legitimate, desirable, and even thinkable (Jepperson, 2002; Meyer and Jepperson, 2000; Schofer and Longhofer, 2011). This logic also applies to participation in the global civil society of human rights. Democratic states are less likely to constrain or suppress their citizens’ participation in human rights INGOs; citizens in democratic countries are more aware of the possibilities and importance of this global civic engagement and see it as a natural extension of their domestic civic activities. In light of the importance of democracy, I arrive at the second hypothesis. Hypothesis 2. The more democratic a country’s political institutions, the more human rights INGOs its citizens participate in. 3.3. Political institutions of the state: the state capacity dimension In addition to the effect of democracy, the existing literature has also developed several typologies of national polities based on one or two dimensions within state institutions, and attributes cross-country differences in levels of domestic civic engagement to different national regime types. Drawing on the welfare regime theory (Esping-Andersen, 1990) and social origin theory (Salamon et al., 2000), empirical studies have identified three kinds of national polities—liberal, social democratic, and traditional corporatist. They find that civic association activity tends to be particularly high in nations that have social democratic or liberal democratic political systems, while it is relatively low in nations with corporatist regimes (Curtis et al., 2001; Janoski, 1998; Musick and Wilson, 2008; Salamon and Sokolowski, 2001). On the other hand, depending on a synthetic typology that combines the degree of statism and the degree of corporateness (Jepperson, 2002), Schofer and Fourcade-Gournchas (2001) argue that institutionalized patterns of national polities are associated with distinctive patterns of civil engagement. They contend that statism has a deterrent effect on involvement in civil associational activities, whereas corporateness encourages memberships in civil associations. These typologies of state institutions could otherwise be useful in the study of global civic engagement, but unfortunately they share two limitations. First, they are created with developed and democratic countries in mind, and thus are best applied to explain variation in civil society among well developed democracies. Second, these typologies assume an effective and stable state with sufficient capacity to penetrate the society. This assumption often holds up well in studies of advanced democracies, but it does not travel as well to the developing world. Consequently, these typologies cannot accommodate weak, fragmented, or even chaotic state institutions commonly seen in developing countries (Boone, 2003; Herbst, 2000; Migdal, 1988; O’Donnell, 1993). In reality, not only citizens from rich and democratic countries participate in human rights INGOs, but many INGOs also have members in less developed and authoritarian countries. To better explain cross-national

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variation among more countries, we need to bring in the state capacity dimension and construct a more widely applicable typology of national polities. Compared with democracy, state capacity is an understudied dimension of state institutions relevant to civil society participation (see Levitsky and Murillo, 2009). State capacity is one of the defining characteristics of any political system, and states vary greatly in their ability to formulate and implement policies to achieve certain goals in society. There are various definitions of state capacity. Huntington (1968) defines it from the perspective of ‘‘the level of governance,’’ and argues that a strong state should be able to establish and enforce political order in its sovereign territory. Skocpol (1985) defines state capacity as the ability of states to ‘‘implement goals, especially over the actual or potential opposition of powerful social groups or in the face of recalcitrant socioeconomic circumstances’’ (p. 9) and to administer its territory effectively. Mann (1984), along with Jackman (1993) and Migdal (1988), sees state capacity as a state’s ability to actually penetrate society, to regulate social relationships, and to implement decisions throughout the realm. Price-Smith (2001) offers a broader conception of state capacity, defining it as ‘‘one country’s ability to maximize its prosperity and stability, to exert de facto and de jure control over its territory’’ (p. 25). Although specific definitions may vary, the common theme in these definitions contains two key components: the ability of a state (1) to effectively enact and enforce binding rules and (2) to effectively control its national territory. State capacity is relatively independent of the level of development, the level of democracy, as well as national culture (Huntington, 1968; Jackman, 1993; Kugler and Domke, 1986), so simply controlling for conventional socioeconomic factors does not sufficiently account for state capacity. Taking state capacity seriously—treating it as a key dimension, rather than a taken-for-granted assumption—will help us to build an explanation of participation in the global human rights field that applies to both the developed and developing worlds. According to the literature that stresses a competitive state-society relationship, civic life is more likely to thrive when ‘‘the state pulls back, shrinks, or fails’’ (Schofer and Longhofer, 2011, p. 540). A strong state dominates public life and thus leaves little room for the role of the society (Joyce and Schambra, 1996). From this perspective, state capacity is expected to have a negative effect on civic participation in human rights INGOs. Strong state capacity gives the state an advantage, even a monopoly, on participation in international affairs, and thus ‘‘crowds out’’ citizens’ associational life in global civil society. However, it is also likely that state capacity itself is neutral in terms of its impact on participation in human rights INGOs. As discussed below, the way the state makes use of this capacity is contingent on the democracy dimension. Depending on whether the state is democratic or authoritarian, state capacity can be used to either facilitate or suppress citizens’ participation in human rights INGOs. The competing hypotheses below are about the negative or neutral effect of state capacity. Hypothesis 3-1. Strong state capacity of a country has a negative effect on the number of human rights INGOs its citizens participate in. Hypothesis 3-2. State capacity of a country has no effect on the number of human rights INGOs its citizens participate in. 3.4. Interaction between democracy and state capacity I further argue that the interaction between democracy and state capacity plays an important role in shaping a country’s participation in human rights INGOs. State institutions vary along the two dimensions, and states built on different combinations of the two dimensions provide differing conditions for their citizens’ participation in human rights INGOs. The democracy dimension determines whether the state has motives to promote, tolerate, or restrain its citizens’ participation, while the state capacity dimension determines whether it has sufficient capacity to do so. Compared with authoritarian ones, democratic states are less likely to suppress their citizens’ engagement in the global civil society of human rights. Following the same logic presented in Hypothesis 2, a higher degree of democracy provides citizens with more means, freedom, and legitimacy to participate in human rights INGOs. The democracy dimension alone is not sufficient, however. Besides whether the state has motives to interfere, we also need to examine whether it has the capacity to do so. The second dimension is about whether the state has sufficient capacity to restrain its citizens’ participation in global civil society. Democratic countries may have either strong or weak capacity, and so may authoritarian countries. When an authoritarian state is equipped with strong capacity, it is able to mobilize this capacity to suppress its citizens’ connections with human rights INGOs. In contrast, a weak authoritarian state may intend to restrain its citizens’ participation in human rights INGOs, but it lacks actual ability to do so. Therefore, strong state capacity combined with an authoritarian regime is particularly unfavorable for participation in human rights INGOs. Strong capacity is not always bad for global civic engagement, however. When combined with a democratic state, it contributes to the formation of a stable and effective democracy through providing effective law enforcement, necessary institutional infrastructure, and orderly associational activities (Huntington, 1968; O’Donnell, 1993; Wuthnow, 1991). Among democratic countries associational life is most likely to thrive in the presence of an effective modern state (Migdal, 1988; Salamon and Sokolowski, 2001). Instead of ‘‘crowding out’’ civic life, a strong democracy is found to encourage and sustain associational life in society (Schofer and Longhofer, 2011). Citizens of strong and stable democracies have more experience with the principles and practices of institutionalized association, and thus tend to be more active in human rights INGOs. To the contrary, civil society cannot flourish amid political disorder, lawlessness, or an inadequate institutional infrastructure. Civic engagement in global civil society cannot be strong where the state is weak and chaotic.

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Fig. 1. Interaction between democracy and state capacity.

Moreover, strong democratic states are also capable of directly supporting global human rights movements. They have a tendency to externalize their domestic ideals and extend their liberal values abroad, according to ideational theory or ‘‘liberal constructivist’’ theory in political science (Risse-Kappen, 1995; Moravcsik, 1997; Russett, 1993; Russett and Oneal, 2001). Strong democratic states encourage citizens’ participation in human rights INGOs because human rights are consistent with universal ideals to which they adhere. They play a leading role in the global institutionalization of human rights, and often incorporate human rights into their foreign policies. The leading role of strong democracies in supporting international human rights popularizes human rights as a legitimate, even fashionable, issue among their citizens, which in turn makes participation in human rights INGOs an appropriate and popular act. In contrast, weak democratic countries do not have this motivation and capacity to promote human rights globally. The priority of both the state and society there is still occupied by domestic political needs such as consolidating and strengthening weak (and often unstable) political institutions at home. Taken together, democracy makes a more salient difference for strong states than weak states. While strong democratic states are the most favorable for civic engagement in human rights INGOs, strong authoritarian ones are the most unfavorable. In weak states, democracy does not manifest its effect so dramatically. In other words, the effect of democracy is contingent on state capacity; state capacity serves as an institutional background that amplifies the effect of democracy (see Fig. 1). Interacting the two dimensions offers us a more sophisticated understanding of the effect of democracy on global civic engagement. Hypothesis 4 is about this interaction effect between democracy and state capacity. Hypothesis 4. The effect of democracy on human rights INGO memberships is greater among strong states than among weak states. 3.5. A new typology of regime types The two dimensions can be further combined to construct a parsimonious typology of national polities consisting of four distinct regime types (see Fig. 2). Whereas the literature on domestic civic engagement has focused primarily on the upper left quadrant of Fig. 2, all four regime types are common in reality. As explained above, a democratic state with strong institutional capacity provides the most favorable context for civic participation in human rights INGOs, and a strong authoritarian state is the most unfavorable setting. Weak states are in between. Since democracy promotes civic engagement better than autocracy in general, a weak democracy is still slightly more favorable than a weak autocracy. Hypothesis 5 is about the differential effects of regime types. Hypothesis 5. In terms of how favorable they are for civic participation in human rights INGOs, national polities can be ranked as follows (from the most favorable to the least favorable):

Strong democratic states > Weak democratic states > Weak authoritarian states > Strong authoritarian states 4. Data and methods The panel data used here span 40 years, from 1966 through 2006 at 5-year intervals. The choice of 1966 as the starting point is not arbitrary. Initiating the global institutionalization of human rights, the two human rights covenants, the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, were adopted in 1966. The dataset has nine time points and covers 162 sovereign countries (see Appendix A). The panel data are unbalanced—several countries do not have data at all time points, mainly because they were either established after 1966 (e.g., Armenia and Eritrea) or ceased existing before 2006 (e.g., East Germany and the Soviet Union).3 The unit of observation is a ‘‘country-year,’’ that is, a country in a given year. 3

I also analyzed the ‘‘balanced’’ data, limiting the analysis to countries with data at all time points. This analysis generates substantively identical results.

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High State Capacity

Low

Democracy High Low Strong authoritarian regime Strong democratic regime (China, Cuba, North Korea, (Australia, Canada, France, the US …) Saudi Arabia …) Weak democratic regime (Argentina, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa …)

Weak authoritarian regime (Egypt, Ethiopia, Sudan, Venezuela …)

Note: The countries shown are classified based on their state types in 2006. See Appendix B for complete classification of countries.

Fig. 2. The typology of state regimes along two dimensions.

4.1. Dependent variables Data on memberships in human rights INGOs come from the book version of Yearbook of International Organizations, the most complete census of international organizations, which is published annually by the Union of International Associations (UIA). The UIA has long had semi-official status as the compiler of information on INGOs through ties with the League of Nations and United Nations. It also maintains continuous contact with most of the active INGOs. Therefore, the Yearbook provides the ‘‘most extensive information on organizations in the world polity’’ (Drori et al., 2003, pp. 49–50), and is considered as the standard source for INGO membership data (Beckfield, 2003; Boli and Thomas, 1999). The organizations in the data constitute the population of human rights INGOs classified as genuinely international bodies by the UIA. First, these genuine INGOs include all nongovernmental organizations listed by the UIA as the ‘‘Federations of INGOs,’’ ‘‘Universal INGOs,’’ ‘‘Intercontinental INGOs,’’ and ‘‘Regional INGOs’’ sections, while excluding many NGOs of international orientation that are not international in membership and structure. My analysis uses total figures for the four categories combined. Second, to determine which are human rights INGOs within the conventional INGO population, all organizational entries in the 1966/1967, 1970/1971, 1977, 1981, 1986/1987, 1991/1992, 1996/1997, 2001/2002, and 2006/2007 volumes of the Yearbook (Union of International Associations, various years) were reviewed. Issue areas in global civil society usually do not have clear-cut boundaries, and many INGOs fall within ambiguous categories. Without a consensus on the definition of human rights INGOs, self-perception and self-definition by INGOs themselves constitute arguably the most sensible method of identifying human rights INGOs (Steiner, 1991, p. 7). Therefore, I coded organizations that include ‘‘human rights’’ in their names or primary aims as human rights INGOs. This operational definition is a relatively strict one and limits human rights INGOs to those who explicitly aim to promote human rights. INGO members are individual citizens, though in some cases they are associations; the latter, in turn, usually have only individuals as members. The UIA ‘‘registers a country as a ‘member’ of an INGO if at least one organization or resident of that country belongs to the INGO’’ (Beckfield, 2003, p. 406). Accordingly, I created the dependent variable, memberships in human rights INGOs, in two steps. First, for each INGO I used values of 1 and 0 to indicate whether a country is its ‘‘member.’’ Next, the data were aggregated to obtain the total number of human rights INGOs each country belongs to. This total per country is a measure of the extent to which a given country’s citizens participate in human rights INGOs. Hence, the data here are aggregate figures using the country as the unit of analysis. For example, in 2006 a total of 84 human rights INGOs had members in the US, so the US is coded as participating in 84 human rights INGOs in the year 2006.

4.2. Explanatory variables Data on human right practices of the state come from the conventional Freedom House indices of political rights and civil liberties (available at http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=439, retrieved November 2010). As suggested by

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previous studies (Tsutsui and Wotipka, 2004), I combine the Freedom House measures of political rights and civil liberties due to their high degree of collinearity and create a composite index of domestic human rights practices. This composite measure ranges from 2 to 14, with higher values indicating better human rights.4 I also tried the Cingranelli–Richards (CIRI) human rights index (available at http://ciri.binghamton.edu/, retrieved November 2010), which is a composite index constructed from torture, extrajudicial killing, political imprisonment, and disappearance indicators. Using this CIRI index generates substantively similar results to those presented in the following sections. Data on political institutions of the state come from the Polity IV dataset compiled by Marshall and Jaggers of the Polity Project. It contains coded annual information on political regime characteristics and encompasses all countries whose population exceeds five hundred thousand (Marshall and Jaggers, 2009). The Polity IV dataset has developed a trusted ‘‘tradition of coding the authority characteristics of states in the world system for purposes of comparative, quantitative analysis’’ (p. 1), and has facilitated numerous empirical studies on political institutions. I acknowledge that in any large-scale cross-country study such as this one, there is a trade-off between detail and generalizability; nevertheless, the Polity IV data provide the most conventional, and arguably the most reliable, measures for the explanatory variables under study. For the democracy dimension I draw on the commonly used democracy score from the Polity IV dataset.5 It is a composite indicator that combines three essential components of institutionalized democracy: the competitiveness and openness of executive recruitment, the constraints on the chief executive, and the competitiveness of political participation. I use the 21-point measure of a state’s democratic characteristics, which ranges from 10 (very authoritarian) to +10 (very democratic). A larger score indicates a more democratic regime. The second dimension, state capacity, is measured dichotomously. As discussed earlier, the core of state capacity is the ability of a state (1) to effectively enact and enforce binding rules and (2) to administer all its sovereign territory. Accordingly, I operationalize it by two measures in the Polity IV dataset: (1) ‘‘Regulation of Political Participation’’—whether the state has effective, enduring, and systematic state laws regulating political activity; (2) ‘‘Polity Fragmentation’’—whether there is a separate polity, or polities, comprising substantial territory within the recognized borders of the state and over which the state exercises no effective authority. A strong state should both (1) have effective regulation of political participation and (2) have no polity fragmentation. Countries that lack one or both components are seen as weak states. In this dummy variable, strong states are coded as 1 and weak states are coded as 0. To create regime types based on the two dimensions, I first dichotomize the democracy score into a binary measure—a score above 0 is coded as democracy while a score under 0 (including 0) is coded as autocracy.6 Then I combine it with the binary measure of state capacity to produce the four regime types shown in Fig. 2 (see Appendix B for the complete classification of countries in 2006). These four regime types are used as dummy variables in the following analysis. 4.3. Control variables The first set of control variables, including GDP per capita and population, measures the influence of conventional domestic factors on levels of participation in human rights INGOs.7 GDP per capita measures national economic development, and is a good indicator of the general level of resources available to a national population. Rich societies have more of the resources required to be connected to human rights INGOs. Wealth is also associated with enhanced education, more leisure time, and other characteristics that may increase civic engagement. By including a measure of population, I control for the simple fact that countries with a bigger population have more potential individuals to participate in INGOs. Data on both variables are obtained from the United Nations Common Database (available at http://data.un.org/, retrieved November 2010). The GDP per capita data are converted into constant US dollars. Both measures are logged to correct for skewed distributions. The second set of control variables measures the level of integration into the world economy and the world polity. I use the sum of exports and imports of goods and services as a share of the GDP as a proxy for economic openness.8 Data are from the United Nations Common Database (available at http://data.un.org/, retrieved November 2010). I use the number of memberships in IGOs and the number of INGO memberships (minus the number of human rights INGOs) to measure a country’s 4 Freedom House started collecting data on human rights in 1972, so the following models that include the Freedom House human rights index actually analyze the data from 1976 through 2006. However, whether or not controlling for domestic human rights practices, whether analyzing the data from 1966 or 1976, I found substantively similar results and that all findings presented in this paper hold. 5 I also tried democracy measures from the ACLP Political and Economic dataset, which is also very popular among political scientists (Alvarez et al., 1996; Cheibub and Gandhi, 2004; Przeworski et al., 2000). It has both dichotomous and continuous measures of democracy. A country is classified as a democracy if the executive and the legislature are filled through contested elections, where more than one party has a chance of winning. The quantified measure of democracy is a contested democracy index standardized to a 100-point scale. Using these democracy measures instead of the Polity IV data does not substantively change the results. 6 I also used the dichotomous democracy measure from the ACLP Political and Economic dataset (Alvarez et al., 1996; Cheibub and Gandhi, 2004; Przeworski et al., 2000) to create the regime types. It generates slightly different classification of countries, but all regression results are substantively similar to those using the Polity IV democracy score. 7 I also controlled education (the percentage of the population with high school education), which does not have any significant effect in all models and does not change the results either. Data on education (1971–2006) are from ‘‘Secondary School Enrollment Ratio (% gross)’’ of the World Bank ‘‘World Development Indicators’’ data, available at http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.SEC.ENRR (retrieved December 2011). 8 I also tried the amount of FDI flows into a country or FDI flows as a percentage of the GDP. Data on FDI flows come from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Statistics Database (available at http://unctadstat.unctad.org/, retrieved November 2010). Whether international trade or FDI or both are used in the models, it does not substantively change the main findings of this paper.

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Table 1 Descriptive statistics for variables used in the analysis. Variable

Mean

Standard deviation

Minimum

Maximum

HRINGO GDP per capita Population Economic openness IGO ties INGO ties Democracy Strong state capacity Strong democratic regime Weak democratic regime Weak authoritarian regime Strong authoritarian regime Domestic human rights Western culture Core Semi-periphery Periphery

15.82 4889.50 2.93  107 .63 49.60 572.71 .32 .43 .20 .29 .28 .23 4.42 .20 .07 .29 .64

18.84 10062.31 1.09  108 .77 21.46 390.32 7.55 .48 .40 .39 .39 .40 1.98 .38 .26 .45 .48

0 45 508,998 .05 0 0 10 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0

110 92,049 1.30  109 13.63 126 4303 10 1 1 1 1 1 14 1 1 1 1

degree of embeddedness in the world polity. More IGO memberships indicate a higher degree of integration into the state-centric world polity, while more INGO linkages suggest a greater overall propensity to join INGOs. Data come from the Yearbook of International Organizations. The more integrated into the world economy and the world polity, the more likely a country’s citizens are aware of and come into contact with human rights INGOs. All three variables are logged to reduce skew. The third set of control variables includes world system status and world civilization type. Position in the world system is relevant to involvement in human rights INGOs, as the core has interest in dominating the creation and diffusion of world norms and policy scripts (Beckfield, 2003). Differences among civilizations matter for involvement in human rights INGOs since there is conflict over which cultural systems should be represented in world culture (Huntington, 1996). Data on world system status come from previous network studies (Clark and Beckfield, 2009; Van Rossem, 1996; Smith and White, 1992). Data on civilization types come from Henderson (2004) and are consistent with Huntington’s theory (1996). Since the main findings using the 10-civilization categorization do not differ substantively from those using the dichotomous measure (Western and non-Western), to simplify table presentation I report the dichotomous measure in the tables. The fourth set of control variables takes diffusion effects into account. It is likely that human rights INGO participation at time t 1 inspires more memberships at time t. It is also likely that participation diffuses most readily within geographically proximate regions. Hence, I control previous human rights INGO memberships, that is, memberships lagged by one 5-year period. I also control the average memberships of the region in which a country is located. Regions are created based on the UN definition of macro geographic regions (see Appendix A). Table 1 summarizes the descriptive statistics of the variables used in the analysis. 4.4. Limitations of the data Like many empirical studies using organizational directories, my data are likely to be biased in favor of larger and more publicized organizations (Beckfield, 2003, p. 406; Longhofer and Schofer, 2010, pp. 513–514; Schofer and Longhofer, 2011, pp. 553–555). Due to the ‘‘self-perception’’ and ‘‘self-definition’’ method used here to identify human rights INGOs, my data better capture those INGOs that explicitly work for or specialize in human rights. Hence, smaller, less formal and peripheral human rights INGOs are underrepresented in the data; the data may also underestimate those INGOs that do not specialize in human rights or do not view themselves as human rights INGOs (although they may conduct some sort of human rights activities). Accordingly, this study focuses on participation in larger, more publicized, and self-claimed human rights INGOs that are an essential part of the global human rights field. These large and publicized INGOs are ‘‘arguably the most consequential for many outcomes of interest’’ (Schofer and Longhofer, 2011, p. 543) to political sociologists and human rights activists, such as human rights movement mobilization and global diffusion of human rights, and thus warrant study. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that this study does not provide a census of all human rights INGOs across the globe, so the findings may not apply to peripheral, marginalized, and ambiguous branches of the global human rights field. 4.5. Methods The dependent variable, memberships in human right INGOs, is a nonnegative integer-valued count variable. The OLS method for count data results in biased, inefficient, and inconsistent estimates (Long, 1997). Count data often follow a Poisson distribution, so approaches based on the Poisson distribution are more appropriate for analyzing count data. In this study, however, the variance of human rights INGO memberships is much larger than the mean at all time points. For example, in 2006 the mean of the dependent variable is 44.28, whereas its variance is as large as 474.98. This distribution displays

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M. Zhou / Social Science Research 41 (2012) 1254–1274 Table 2 Memberships in human rights INGOs, 1966–2006. Year

Mean

Standard deviation

Minimum

Maximum

Top three countries with most memberships

1966 1976 1986 1996 2006

4.19 5.43 8.70 19.63 44.28

3.29 3.67 5.95 13.06 21.79

0 0 1 3 8

14 17 29 62 110

France, France, France, France, France,

UK UK Italy, Belgium Belgium, UK UK, Germany

Note: In 1966, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, West Germany, Italy, and Netherlands were tied for the third place; in 1976, Italy and West Germany were tied for the third place.

a typical sign of over-dispersion, that is, greater variance than might be expected in a Poisson distribution. A negative binomial model is more appropriate in the cases of over-dispersion (Cameron and Trivedi, 1998; Long, 1997). A likelihood ratio test for over-dispersion also indicates that the negative binomial regression model is preferred to the Poisson regression model in this study. Since the data are longitudinal, the independence assumption of conventional negative binomial models is violated. Random effects negative binomial (RENB) models have been developed to account for the non-independence of events in longitudinal data (Long, 1997; Long and Freese, 2003). I use the xtnbreg, re command in the Stata software (Release 10; StataCorp., 2007) to obtain the RENB estimates, with standard errors adjusted for clustering within countries.9 All explanatory and control variables are lagged by one period (5 years) to help establish time order and causal direction.10 To control unobserved year heterogeneity, I also include a year dummy variable for each year in the analysis. The year fixed effects account for historical influences that affect all countries such as global diffusion of human rights INGOs over time (especially the increase in the total number of human rights INGOs), and discrete events of global importance such as world conferences on human rights. 5. Results 5.1. Variation in human rights INGO memberships The number of INGOs explicitly devoted to the promotion of human rights increased more than 10-fold between 1966 and 2006. In 1966 there were only 16 human rights INGOs. The number increased to 33 in 1976, 49 in 1986, 98 in 1996, and finally reached 167 in 2006. Countries’ memberships in human rights INGOs have also witnessed a similar change over the same period (see Table 2). In 2006, the average number of memberships reached 44.3, a more than 10-fold increase since 1966. The cross-national variation in human rights INGO memberships is noteworthy. I describe this cross-national variation in two ways. First, I display this inequality at the latest time point in my data. Fig. 3 visualizes the cross-national variation in 2006. Some countries participate in notably more human rights INGOs than others. For instance, while France, the UK, Germany belong to 110, 106, 105, human rights INGOs, respectively, Bhutan (8), North Korea (10), Oman and Qatar (both 12) participate in the fewest human rights INGOs. Second, I assess cross-national variation in human rights INGO memberships over time. To track inequality in the world polity over time, scholars often use the coefficient of variation, that is, the standard deviation as a percentage of the mean (Beckfield, 2003; Boli et al., 1999). The larger the coefficient, the larger the inequality in INGO memberships. Fig. 4 plots coefficients of variation in human rights INGO memberships from 1966 through 2006. The standard deviation declined from 0.79 to 0.49 of the mean, so cross-national variation in human rights INGO memberships has decreased over time. This pattern is consistent with the general trend identified by other world-polity studies (Beckfield, 2003; Boli et al., 1999). 5.2. Correlation between memberships and other variables Correlations between membership in human rights INGOs and relevant variables are presented in Table 3. Membership in human rights INGOs is positively correlated with GDP per capita, population, economic openness, world polity ties, Western civilization, core and semi-peripheral world system status, but is negatively correlated with peripheral world system status. All these correlations are significantly different from 0 at the .05 level except that between membership and economic openness. Notably, contrary to both competing hypotheses in Hypothesis 1, there is a significantly positive correlation (r = .24) between membership and domestic human rights practices. As for the variables representing political institutions, membership in human rights INGOs is significantly and positively correlated with the degree of democracy (r = .51). It supports Hypothesis 2. The correlation between membership and state capacity is moderately negative (r = .18), which seems to favor the ‘‘crowding out’’ hypothesis within Hypothesis 3. Among the dummy variables representing regime types, the 9 Some researchers stress the importance of using a two-part model of the negative binomial analysis (e.g., Pohlmeier and Ulrich, 1995; Silva et al., 2001), as zeros and positive counts may be generated by two processes with different sets of parameters. The first process is a binary outcome model, and the second process is a truncated count model. The hurdle model and the zero-inflated count model are most frequently used to deal with this limitation of the negative binomial analysis (for details see Cameron and Trivedi, 1998, pp. 123–128). I use the zero-inflated count model as a robustness check, and all findings hold. 10 For the first time point (the year 1966) data on the lagged explanatory and control variables are from 1961.

M. Zhou / Social Science Research 41 (2012) 1254–1274

30 25 20 15 0

5

10

Number of Countries

35

40

1264

8

14 20 26 32 38 44 50 56 62 68 74 80 86 92 98 104 110

Number of Human Rights INGO Memberships Fig. 3. Cross-national variation in human rights INGO memberships in 2006. Note: The curve is based on the kernel density estimate.

correlation is positive and the largest for strong democratic regimes (r = .37), followed by weak democratic regimes (r = .16); the correlation with weak authoritarian regimes is close to 0 and not significant (r = .06), while strong authoritarian regimes have a significantly negative correlation (r = .47). This pattern is consistent with Hypothesis 5. Democratic states with strong capacity provide the most favorable context for this civic participation, whereas authoritarian states with strong capacity are the least favorable setting. 5.3. Models of human rights INGO memberships To more accurately examine the hypotheses, I control for influences from other relevant variables by using the RENB estimator. The results are presented in Table 4. (1) Hypothesis 1. The effect of human rights practices. Model 1 shows that controlling for other relevant factors, human rights practices of the state has a significant and positive effect on human rights INGO memberships. This result is not consistent with either of the two competing hypotheses in Hypothesis 1. This positive effect remains in Model 2 when I further control for the influence of previous human rights INGO memberships and regional diffusion. It is worth noting that when democracy is included in the models (from Model 3 onwards), the effect of human rights prac-

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M. Zhou / Social Science Research 41 (2012) 1254–1274

Coefficient of Variation

0.9

0.79

0.8

0.71

0.7

0.68 0.66 0.68 0.67 0.67 0.57

0.6

0.49

0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 1966 1971 1976 1981 1986 1991 1996 2001 2006

Year Fig. 4. Cross-national variation in human rights INGO memberships over time, 1966–2006. Table 3 Correlations between human rights INGO memberships and other variables. Variables (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (12) (13) (14) (15) (16) (17) *

(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

(7)

(8)

(9)

(10)

(11)

(12)

(13)

(14)

(15)

(16)

(17)

Membership 1.00 GDP per capita .48* 1.00 Population .12* .02 1.00 Economic openness .07 .11* .10* 1.00 IGO ties .73* .46* .14* .08* 1.00 INGO ties .82* .63* .12* .11* .70* 1.00 Democracy .51* .34* .02 .03 .52* .62* 1.00 Strong state capacity .18* .23* .01 .09* .09* .12* .15* 1.00 Strong democratic regime .37* .54* .03 .03 .46* .55* .63* .39* 1.00 Weak democratic regime .16* .12* .03 .07 .07* .13* .35* .61* .24* 1.00 Weak authoritarian regime .06 .16* .03 .05 .04 .02 .09* .63* .25* .24* 1.00 Strong authoritarian regime .47* .21* .02 .06 .47* .60* .85* .67* .42* .41* .42* 1.00 Domestic human rights .24* .18* .03 .02 .29* .38* .32* .21* .41* .18* .09 .43* 1.00 Western culture .34* .46* .01 .01 .41* .59* .45* .29* .70* .16* .19* .28* .23* 1.00 Core .32* .38* .08* .06 .45* .57* .36* .23* .58* .14* .14* .24* .31* .54* 1.00 Semi-periphery .19* .12* .23* .04 .22* .12* .15* .08* .14* .02 .09* .03 .12 .29* .16* 1.00 Periphery .35* .31* .25* .07 .45* .50* .34* .20* .45* .09* .16* .16* .39* .55* .37* .86* 1.00

P < 05 (two-tailed test).

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

tices disappears. Whether the effect is positive or insignificant, the result indicates that human rights abuses do not stimulate more memberships in human rights INGOs. Hence, participation in human rights INGOs cannot simply be seen as a response to human rights violations of the state. Hypothesis 2. The effect of democracy. Model 3 and Model 4 show that democracy has a significant and positive effect on human rights INGO memberships. The more democratic a state is, the more human rights INGOs its citizens participate in. This result bears out Hypothesis 2, so democratic political institutions indeed promote participation in human rights INGOs. Hypothesis 3. The effect of state capacity. In Model 5 and Model 6, in addition to the level of democracy, I bring in the binary measure of state capacity, in which 1 identifies strong states and 0 indicates weak states. The effect of state capacity is slightly negative, but it does not reach statistical significance. The result favors the neutral effect of state capacity proposed in Hypothesis 3. Thus, state capacity itself does not have an independent and significant effect on human rights INGO memberships. Hypothesis 4. The interaction effect of democracy and state capacity. As shown in Model 7 and Model 8, the interaction term between democracy and state capacity has a statistically significant coefficient. There is an interaction effect between democracy and state capacity on human rights INGO memberships. More importantly, this interaction effect is positive, suggesting that the effect of democracy is larger among strong states than among weak states. This result supports Hypothesis 4 that democracy has a greater impact among strong states. Hypothesis 5. The effect of regime types. In Model 9 and Model 10 I construct four types of state regimes based on democracy and state capacity. I use strong authoritarian states as the benchmark category. In comparison with strong authoritarian states, other regime types all have significantly more memberships in human rights INGOs, holding all other influences constant. Specifically, strong democratic states have an average of 51% (e.409 1) more memberships,

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Table 4 Random effects negative binomial regression models of human rights INGO memberships: unstandardized coefficients. Hypothesis 1

Hypothesis 2

Hypothesis 3

Hypothesis 4

Hypothesis 5

Model

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Domestic human rights Democracy Strong capacity

.038* (2.43)

.032* (2.22)

.025 (1.65) .023*** (9.25)

.014 (1.03) .013*** (8.47)

.026 (1.14) .023*** (9.28) .010 ( .98)

.018 (1.01) .011*** (7.24) .008 ( 1.07)

.027 (1.06) .020***(4.74) .043** ( 3.13) .014*** (3.82)

.011 (.98) .011***(4.40) .035** ( 3.21)

.017 (1.35)

.012 (.73)

.409***(7.51) .276*** (5.89) .233*** (5.46) –

.382***(7.07) .254*** (5.69) .219*** (5.10) –

.015***(11.25) .059** (3.40) .018 (.90) .112* (2.48) .646*** (9.05) .203** (3.19) .136* (2.10) .091 (1.58)

.012*** (9.01) .042** (3.18) .017 (1.08) .098 (1.16) .703*** (8.66) .196* (2.24) .101 (1.33) .025 (1.13) .005*** (3.80) .003 (1.02)

9.31*** ( 16.11) 1606.3

6.73*** ( 15.20) 1289.2

Log likelihood

.017***(11.23) .061*** (4.01) .025 (1.10) .122* (2.21) .671*** (10.01) .170* (2.35) .123 (1.88) .077 (1.52)

8.32***( 18.87) 1612.3

.017***(11.10) .053***(3.77) .029 (1.40) .101*(2.13) .639***(9.78) .172* (2.44) .142 (1.49) .038 (1.01) .006*** (4.12) .005 (1.22)

.013***(10.79) .050*** (3.62) .021 (.86) .103* (2.46) .632*** (8.85) .178** (3.12) .134*(2.05) .091 (1.78)

.011***(8.37) .043** (3.53) .027 (1.39) .099 (1.70) .600*** (8.26) .167* (2.11) .119 (1.74) .028 (1.25) .005***(3.81) .003 (.98)

.015***(10.33) .050***(3.70) .028 (1.44) .120* (2.17) .649*** (8.90) .182* (2.38) .140* (2.00) .081 (1.36)

.012***(8.92) .044*** (3.51) .022 (1.26) .093 (1.90) .612*** (8.31) .153* (2.29) .122 (1.85) .032 (.98) .006*** (4.04) .004 (1.12)

.012*** (9.76) .042*** (3.58) .017 (.78) .107* (2.34) .625*** (8.31) .173** (2.98) .143 (1.86) .076 (1.49)

7.12*** ( 15.54) 1301.0

9.14*** ( 17.81) 1604.5

6.40*** ( 14.62) 1287.5

8.99*** ( 17.69) 1602.6

6.12*** ( 12.87) 1285.3

9.02*** ( 17.04) 1597.6

.012*** (3.76)

.011*** (8.51) .051*** (3.79) .020 (1.23) .096 (1.48) .588*** (8.10) .156* (2.08) .113 (1.59) .040 (.74) .005*** (3.62) .004 (1.13) 6.55***( 12.51) 1280.2

Notes: (1) N = 1059; (2) numbers in parentheses are z-values; (3) from 2-tailed tests; (4) all models are statistically significant according to Wald v2 tests; (5) the year fixed effects (year dummy variables) are controlled in all models, but not shown to save space; (6) strong authoritarian regime is the reference group for regime types; non-Western culture and periphery are reference groups for world culture and world system status, respectively. * P < .05. ** P < .01. *** P < .001.

M. Zhou / Social Science Research 41 (2012) 1254–1274

Democracy  strong capacity Regime types (1) Strong democratic (2) Weak democratic (3) Weak authoritarian (4) Strong authoritarian GDP per capita (logged) Population (logged) Trade openness (logged) IGO ties (logged) INGO ties (logged) Western culture Core Semi-periphery Previous memberships Regional average memberships Constant

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M. Zhou / Social Science Research 41 (2012) 1254–1274

80.00

Strong Democratic Regime 70.00

Count of Memberships

Weak Democratic Regime 60.00

Weak Authoritarian Regime

50.00

Strong Authoritarian Regime

40.00 30.00 20.00 10.00 0.00 1966

1976

1986

1996

2006

Year Fig. 5. Memberships in human rights INGOs across four regime types, 1966–2006.

while weak democratic states and weak authoritarian states participate in 32% (e.276 1) and 26% (e.233 1) more human rights INGOs, respectively.11 This result is consistent with Hypothesis 5 that strong democratic regimes provide the most favorable setting, and strong authoritarian ones are the least favorable, while weak democratic and weak authoritarian regimes fall in between. (6) The effects of other controls. A few control variables also show significant effects on human rights INGO memberships. The positive effect of GDP per capita and population indicates the importance of financial and human resources for participation in human rights INGOs. Consistent with world polity theory, general connections with the global civil society (measured by INGO ties) promote memberships in human rights INGOs. Countries with Western culture have some advantages in the global human rights field. Previous human rights INGO memberships also inspire new memberships. 5.4. Models of differential participation over time As shown in Fig. 4, the overall cross-national variation in human rights INGO memberships has decreased over time. In contrast, it seems that the unequal participation in human rights INGOs across regime types has remained or increased throughout the whole period. Fig. 5 tracks this uneven participation across regime types from 1966 through 2006. Has the effect of state institutions declined, remained, or increased over time? The previous models have shown that among state institutions, levels of democracy and regime types (created by interacting democracy and state capacity) have significant effects on human rights INGO memberships. I further track the change in their effects over time by the RENB estimator. To this end, I add in a linear year term and a year-by-covariate interaction term for the democracy variable and each regime type.12 To facilitate interpretation I transform year from its original form to integers ranging between 0 and 8 (i.e., with the year 1966 as 0 and 2006 as 8), so that the baseline of the model describes the year 1966. These year-by-covariate interaction terms are created by interacting each covariate with the year term. The coefficients and their corresponding z tests of these newly created year-by-covariate interaction terms are of most interest here. The coefficients of the year-by-covariate interaction terms estimate the effect of each factor on INGO memberships as varying, conditional on the level of the year term. Hence, they directly measure the change in these effects over time. The z-values of these year-by-covariate interaction terms test whether the change over time is significant (Friedrich, 1982; Jaccard and Turrisi, 2003). Table 5 presents the results of the models that estimate and test the change over time. Model 1 in Table 5 corresponds to Model 3 in Table 4, to which I add the newly created year-by-democracy interaction term. The main effect of democracy in this model represents its effect in the baseline year 1966, while the effect of the interaction term shows how this effect has changed between 1966 and 2006. The main effect of democracy is significant and positive, consistent with the result shown in Table 4. Moreover, its interaction effect with year is not statistically significant, suggesting a largely unchanged effect of democracy over time. When combined, the results indicate that democratic political institutions have consistently been a positive influence on participation in human rights INGOs over the years. This pattern still holds in Model 2. Model 3 in Table 5 is built on Model 9 in Table 4, to which the newly created year-by-regime type interaction terms are added. Again the benchmark category is the strong authoritarian regime. In comparison with strong authoritarian regimes, the other three regime types demonstrate two distinct patterns of change over time. First, the main effect of strong 11

For technical details on how to interpret coefficients in a negative binomial model as percentage change, see Long (1997, pp. 237, 224–225). I also tried year dummy interaction terms. That is, instead of using a linear year term, I created a dummy variable for each year and interacted these year dummy variables with variables representing political institutions. This analysis reveals a substantively identical pattern as that using a linear year term. 12

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Table 5 Random effects negative binomial regression models of human rights INGO memberships: change over time.

Democracy Interaction with Year Regime types (1) Strong Democratic Interaction with year (2) Weak democratic Interaction with Year (3) Weak authoritarian Interaction with year (4) Strong authoritarian Domestic human rights Year GDP per capita (logged) Population (logged) Economic openness (logged) IGO ties (logged) INGO ties (logged) Western culture Core Semi-periphery Previous memberships Regional average memberships Constant Log likelihood

Model 1

Model 2

.020***(6.37) .001 (1.32)

.018***(6.14) .001 (0.95)

.057 (1.06) .513*** (14.97) .013*** (9.69) .047*** (3.72) .022 (.97) .115 (1.57) .692*** (9.38) .176** (3.33) .154 (1.79) .056 (1.03)

7.564*** ( 13.72) 1598.83

.030 (.77) .511*** (10.21) .010*** (8.75) .032*** (3.61) .012 (.56) .102 (1.23) .632*** (8.01) .105** (3.23) .110 (1.43) .030 (.65) .006*** (3.78) .001 (.68) 6.305*** ( 10.26) 1286.95

Model 3

Model 4

.412***(4.24) .001 ( .67) .162 (1.49) .014*** (3.87) .108 (1.16) .015*** (3.79) Reference group .060 (1.51) .465*** (13.68) .015*** (10.99) .048*** (3.81) .024 (1.02) .125 (1.63) .688*** (10.42) .179** (3.29) .161* (2.02) .098 (1.67)

.379*** (4.01) .001 ( .34) .168 (1.59) .012*** (3.77) .109 (1.53) .014*** (3.64) Reference group .026 (1.00) .421*** (10.71) .012*** (9.11) .037*** (3.64) .009 (.38) .101 (1.25) .629*** (8.42) .142*** (3.07) .102 (1.52) .021 (1.13) .006*** (3.81) .001 (.88) 6.246*** ( 10.03) 1278.40

8.023*** ( 14.35) 1587.21

Notes: (1) N = 1059; (2) numbers in parentheses are z-values; (3) from 2-tailed tests; (4) all models are statistically significant according to Wald v2 tests; (5) strong authoritarian regime is the reference group for regime types; non-Western culture and periphery are reference groups for world culture and world system status, respectively. * P < .05. ** P < .01. *** P < .001.

democratic regimes is significantly positive, and its interaction with year is not significant. This result suggests that strong democratic states have maintained more human rights INGO memberships throughout the period, and that this active engagement has been stable over time. Second, weak democratic and weak authoritarian regimes show similar patterns of change over time—although their main effects in 1966 are not significant, the interaction effects with time are significant and positive.13 Thus, weak democratic and weak authoritarian states did not differ significantly from strong authoritarian states in early years; over time, however, these two types of regimes have become increasingly more active than strong authoritarian states in participation in human rights INGOs. These patterns are also confirmed by Model 4. To better display these changes over time, Fig. 6 is created based on Model 3 in Table 5. For each regime type, by combining its main effect in 1966 and its interaction effect with time, Fig. 6 visualizes how many percentages of more memberships each regime type maintained in comparison with the strong authoritarian regime between 1966 and 2006, holding all other factors constant. Over time the advantage of strong democratic regimes has been stable—they have constantly shown around 50% more memberships than strong authoritarian regimes. Although the lead of two weak regime types over strong authoritarian regimes is not as large, their lead has been growing significantly over the years. Weak democratic regimes had 17.6% more memberships in 1966, but had a 31.5% lead over strong authoritarian regimes in 2006. Similarly, in 1966 weak authoritarian regimes had merely 11.4% more memberships, but this lead increased to 25.6% in 2006. 5.5. Robustness checks To check the robustness of the results presented in Tables 4 and 5, I conduct four additional analyses. First, I analyze the data using negative binomial regression with fixed effects instead of random effects. Second, I estimate the logged number of human right INGO memberships, using first country fixed effects and then random effects panel estimators. Third, I apply the Arellano–Bond generalized method of moments estimator (Arellano and Bond, 1991) to the logged number of human rights INGO memberships, which accommodates a lagged dependent variable as a regressor better than conventional fixed or random effects panel estimators. In these robustness checks, all the hypothesized effects reported in Table 4 and the pattern of 13 I further explored the similar trends between weak democratic and weak authoritarian states. I tried applying the RENB model to weak states only. Democracy consistently gives weak democratic states some edge in the supply (a positive effect of democracy), while more human rights violations create slightly more demand for participation in weak authoritarian countries (a negative effect of human rights practices, that is, a positive effect of human rights violations). This negative effect of human rights practices contrasts with the positive effect in previous models that include all countries. Similar to previous models, however, this effect does not reach statistical significance either. Overall, among weak states the two effects of the state (democracy and human rights violations) offset each other; as a result, the trends of participation do not differ much between weak democratic and weak authoritarian states.

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Memberships in Comparison with Strong Authoritarian Regime (%)

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60.0

51.0

50.7

50.4

50.1

49.8

50.0

Strong Democratic Regime 40.0

Weak Democratic Regime

30.0

Weak Authoritarian Regime 27.9 24.4 20.9

20.0

17.6

31.5

25.6

21.9 18.3

10.0

14.8 11.4

0.0 1966

1976

1986

1996

2006

Year Fig. 6. Percentage increase in human rights INGO memberships in comparison with strong authoritarian regime, 1966–2006. Notes: (1) The percentage shown in this figure indicates how many more memberships a certain regime type has than a strong authoritarian state, holding other influences constant; (2) This figure is created based on Model 3 in Table 5, and the percentage increase is calculated by (eb 1). b is the coefficient in the negative binomial regression; (3) According to Model 3 in Table 5, the downward trend for the strong democratic regime is not statistically significant, while the upward trend for the weak democratic and weak authoritarian regimes is statistically significant.

change over time revealed in Table 5 hold. Furthermore, I also try the zero-inflated negative binomial regression model (ZINB), which is often used when there are many zero counts (Cameron and Trivedi, 1998; Long, 1997; Long and Freese, 2003). I estimate it to examine whether the zero counts in the dependent variable affect the results. I conduct the Vuong (1989) test comparing the ZINB with the regular negative binomial estimator used in the discussion above. The test result favors the regular negative binomial estimator over the ZINB, and there is no evidence that the existence of zero INGO memberships affects the results.14 6. Conclusion and discussion Around human rights an increasing number of INGOs have been established, and transnational networks formed by these organizations are playing an increasingly prominent role in promoting human rights globally. These networks, however, do not penetrate all countries to the same extent, and participation in these human rights INGOs has been noticeably unequal across countries. Especially, the role of the state is an important source of this inequality. Human rights activities are targeted at the state and impinge on state sovereignty, so states have motives and interests in intervening in their citizens’ participation in human rights INGOs. The state shapes this participation on both the supply and the demand sides. Human rights violations of the state may stimulate its citizens’ demand for participation in human rights INGOs, while the institutional environment provided by the state facilitates or suppresses the supply of potential participants. According to the results of the analysis, the role of the state is more prominent on the supply side than the demand side. Institutional conditions provided by the state affect the supply of potential participants, while the demand for human rights activities generated by human rights violations of the state does not have a significant impact. Specifically, this study confirms that democratic states facilitate participation in human rights INGOs better than authoritarian states. They show a greater tendency to tolerate or even promote memberships in these INGOs. The degree of democracy alone, however, is not sufficient to explain the complex pattern of participation across countries. This study improves on existing typologies of state regimes and proposes a new typology based on two intertwined dimensions—democracy and state capacity. There exists an interaction effect between the two dimensions, and the participation-promoting effect of democracy is more salient among strong states than among weak states. Civic engagement in human rights INGOs is most likely to thrive in the presence of a strong democratic state that effectively enforces freedom of association, provides adequate institutional infrastructure, and shows a tendency to externalize their liberal ideals. A strong but authoritarian state, however, is the least favorable setting, because it is able to employ its capacity to effectively prevent citizens from being involved in human rights INGOs. In comparison with this strong authoritarian state, an authoritarian but weak state lacks adequate repressive capacity, so its citizens are able to circumvent state intervention and develop relatively more memberships. This study further tracks this disparity across regime types over time, and finds that differential levels of memberships have not diminished. Strong democratic states have consistently facilitated participation the most. Interestingly, both weak democratic and weak 14 In the robustness checks I use the following Stata commands, respectively: (1) xtnbreg, fe; (2) xtreg, fe and xtreg, re; (3) xtabond; (4) zinb, inflate. All results are available from the author upon request.

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authoritarian states have become increasingly active in this global participation, and consequently the gap between weak states and strong authoritarian states has enlarged significantly over time. Several implications can be drawn from these findings. First, the findings confirm the importance of state institutions in shaping the structure of the global human right field. A state can promote, tolerate, or suppress its citizens’ participation in human rights INGOs, depending on the composition of its political institutions. Individual citizens and global civil society are not directly connected, and this connection has to go through potential intervention from the state. Differences in domestic institutional structures influence both local citizens’ access to human rights INGOs, and these INGOs’ ability to link up with local citizens. The level of democracy and state capacity combine to shape a state’s disposition and capacity in this intervention. Second, these findings also identify where the global civil society of human rights is more likely to penetrate and makes a difference. World polity theory suggests that states with strong linkages to international institutions are most susceptible to world cultural influences, and various case studies have found that human rights INGOs effectively promote human rights in those countries where they have access to local citizens. This study shows that human rights INGOs are more likely to penetrate democratic and weak states, whereas they are not as effective in drawing engagement in strong authoritarian countries. Human rights INGOs need to develop new strategies to circumvent hostile interventions from strong authoritarian states in order to better connect with citizens in those countries. It is also worth mentioning that weak states, whether democratic or authoritarian, are becoming more susceptible to this global influence, as reflected by their citizens’ increasingly active participation in human rights INGOs. Third, this study also reveals inequality in the world polity and its uneven structure. International organizations stratify the international system and endow states with varying degrees of prestige, thereby advantaging some states over others in international relations (Hafner-Burton and Montgomery, 2006; Hughes et al., 2009). Especially, representation in INGOs is often seen as part of the so-called ‘‘soft power’’ (Nye, 2004), as it helps define global agendas and construct ‘‘universal’’ values. Countries with this power are more able to promote a world order reflecting their own worldviews and interests. According to the findings here, democratic states, especially those equipped with strong institutional capacity, have an edge in accumulating this power by facilitating their citizens’ involvement in global civil society. In contrast, strong authoritarian states may seldom succeed in obtaining this power, due to their self-imposed restriction on global civic engagement of their citizens. Last but not least, the typology of national polities developed in this study is not only useful for the study of the human rights field, but may be extended to other fields in global civil society. As the consolidation of many global issue fields increasingly impinges on state sovereignty and subjects states’ behavior to external scrutiny, states tend to have more motives and interests in intervention. I conjecture that the bigger stake the state has in a global issue field, the more effective this typology is in explaining cross-national variation in global civic participation. Thus, this typology may facilitate research on the mediating role of the state between local citizens and global civil society in other issue fields. In future research on the global human rights field, it is also important to develop a typology of human rights INGOs based on specific types of human rights they promote (political and civil rights versus economic, social, and cultural rights, for instance). Participation in some types of human rights INGOs may be more susceptible to the influence of state types than others. Further disaggregating the human rights field will lead to a more subtle understanding of the role played by the state. Acknowledgments Early versions of this article were presented at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, the University of Victoria in Canada, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. I thank Jason Beckfield, Peter V. Marsden, Martin K. Whyte, Anxiang Wang, Social Science Research Editor and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Appendix A. List of countries in the analysis

Africa Eastern Africa Burundi Comoros Djibouti Eritrea Ethiopia Kenya Madagascar Malawi Mauritius

1966–2006 1975–2006 1977–2006 1993–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1968–2006

Middle Africa Angola Cameroon Central African Republic Chad Congo D.R. Congo Equatorial Guinea Gabon

1975–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1968–2006 1966–2006

Southern Africa Botswana Lesotho Namibia South Africa Swaziland

1966–2006 1966–2006 1990–2006 1966–2006 1968–2006

Western Africa Benin Burkina Faso

1966–2006 1966–2006

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Appendix A (continued) Africa Mozambique Rwanda Seychelles Somalia Tanzania Uganda Zambia Zimbabwe

1975–2006 1966–2006 1976–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006

Northern Africa Algeria Egypt Libya Morocco Sudan Tunisia

1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006

Cape Verde Cote d’Ivoire Gambia Ghana Guinea Guinea–Bissau Liberia Mali Mauritania Niger Nigeria Senegal Sierra Leone Togo

1975–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1974–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006

Caribbean Antigua and Barbuda Barbados Cuba Dominican Rep. Haiti Jamaica Trinidad and Tobago

1981–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006

South America Argentina Bolivia Brazil Chile Colombia Ecuador Guyana Paraguay Peru Uruguay Venezuela

1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006

Central Asia Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan Tajikistan Turkmenistan Uzbekistan

1991–2006 1991–2006 1991–2006 1991–2006 1991–2006

1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 2002–2006 1966–2006

Western Asia Armenia Azerbaijan Bahrain Cyprus Georgia Iraq Israel Jordan Kuwait Lebanon Oman Qatar Saudi Arabia Syrian Arab Republic Turkey United Arab Emirates Yemen

1991–2006 1991–2006 1971–2006 1966–2006 1991–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1971–2006 1971–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1971–2006 1990–2006

South-Eastern Asia Cambodia Indonesia Laos Malaysia Myanmar Philippines Singapore Thailand Timor-Leste Viet Nam

Eastern Europe Belarus Bulgaria Czech Republic Czechoslovakia

1991–2006 1966–2006 1993–2006 1966–1992

Southern Europe Albania Bosnia and Herzegovina Croatia Greece

1966–2006 1992–2006 1992–2006 1966–2006

Americas Northern America Canada United States

1966–2006 1966–2006

Central America Costa Rica El Salvador Guatemala Honduras Mexico Nicaragua Panama

1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006

Asia Eastern Asia China Japan Mongolia North Korea South Korea

1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006

Southern Asia Afghanistan Bangladesh Bhutan India Iran Maldives Nepal Pakistan Sri Lanka

1966–2006 1972–2006 1971–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006

Europe Western Europe Austria Belgium France Germany

1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1990–2006

(continued on next page)

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Appendix A (continued)

Europe Germany (East) Germany (West) Netherlands Switzerland

1966–1990 1966–1990 1966–2006 1966–2006

Northern Europe Denmark Estonia Finland Iceland Ireland Latvia Lithuania Norway Sweden United Kingdom

1966–2006 1991–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1991–2006 1991–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006

Hungary Poland Moldova Romania Russia Slovakia Soviet Union Ukraine

1966–2006 1966–2006 1991–2006 1966–2006 1991–2006 1993–2006 1966–1991 1991–2006

Italy Macedonia Malta Portugal Serbia and Montenegro Slovenia Spain Yugoslavia

1966–2006 1993–2006 1966–2006 1966–2006 1992–2006 1992–2006 1966–2006 1966–1991

Oceania Australia Fiji New Zealand Papua New Guinea

1966–2006 1970–2006 1966–2006 1975–2006

Note: Regions are defined by the United Nations ‘‘Macro Geographic Regions,’’ available at http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49regin.htm (retrieved November 2010).

Appendix B. Classification of countries based on regime types, 2006

Democracy High

Low

High Regime Type 1: Strong Democratic Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Mauritius, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Panama, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Trinidad and Tobago, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay

Regime Type 4: Strong Authoritarian Azerbaijan, Belarus, China, Cuba, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Gambia, Kuwait, Laos, Libya, Myanmar, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Swaziland, Syrian Arab Republic, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Vietnam

Low Regime Type 2: Weak Democratic Afghanistan, Albania, Angola, Argentina, Benin, Bhutan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Comoros, Cote d’Ivoire, Croatia, D.P. Congo, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Estonia, Georgia, Ghana, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Liberia, Macedonia, Madagascar, Mali, Mexico, Mongolia, Mozambique, Namibia, Nepal, Niger, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines,

Regime Type 3: Weak Authoritarian Algeria, Armenia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Colombia, Czech, Djibouti, Ecuador, Egypt, Ethiopia, Fiji, Gabon, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Iran, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Lesotho, Malawi, Malaysia, Mauritania, Moldova, Morocco, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Paraguay, Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Togo, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, Venezuela, Yemen, Zambia,

State Capacity

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Appendix A (continued) Democracy High

Low

Romania, Russia, Senegal, Serbia and Montenegro, Zimbabwe Somalia, South Africa, Sri Lanka Note: Classification of countries in other years is also available from the author upon request.

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