Technical and Institutional States: Loose Coupling in the Human Rights Sector of the World Polity

While human rights treaties have become increasingly popular over the past quarter century, there has not been a corresponding improvement in human rights practices. This discrepancy implies that a country's formal pledge to uphold human rights principles is "loosely coupled" from its...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Sociological quarterly 2010, Vol.51 (1), p.65-95
Main Author: Clark, Rob
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Amnesty
Cognitive models
Foreign aid
Foreign investment
Foreign investments
General studies. Ideologies
Globalization
Gross domestic product
Human Rights
International organization
International Trade
Membership
Modeling
Normativity
Organizational Research
Political sociology
Polities
Population size
Repression
Sociology
Sociology of law and criminology
Sociology of law and justice
Space
State
Studies
Treaties
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Summary:While human rights treaties have become increasingly popular over the past quarter century, there has not been a corresponding improvement in human rights practices. This discrepancy implies that a country's formal pledge to uphold human rights principles is "loosely coupled" from its actual performance. In this study, I develop a model of loose coupling based on organizational research and apply it to the human rights sector of the world polity. Empirically, I identify a set of institutional states whose human rights practices fall short of their treaty commitments, as well as a set of technical states whose practices exceed their commitments. Analyzing an unbalanced data set with a maximum of 755 observations across 167 countries during the 1975 to 2000 period, I use random effects models to predict a state's location on the Human Rights Decoupling Index (HRDI). The findings illustrate the importance of several organizational concepts for predicting a state's HRDI score. In particular, the analyses reveal the countervailing effects of globalization. While economic globalization (i.e., trade and foreign investment) is associated with the technical (positive) end of the HRDI, cultural globalization (i.e., memberships in international organizations) is associated with the institutional (negative) end.
ISSN:0038-0253
1533-8525
DOI:10.1111/j.1533-8525.2009.01163.x