Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Background: Human rights are recognized as essential tools for equitable development, as is exemplified by their prominence in the Sustainable Development Goals (preamble & para 3, 8, 10, 19 and 20). The UN and other development agencies have incorporated them in their day-to-day work, making human rights a prime example of public policy beyond borders. The rise of populism and affiliated anti-globalist sentiments present a challenge to this global cooperation, however. With this in mind we pose the question: are human rights something that the local populace wants or only the international community?

Theory and literature gap: The World Polity Theory predicts that it is mainly the latter. It sees the international community as representing a globalized culture in which human rights are cherished. Its main actors, intergovernmental organizations (IGO) and international NGOs (INGO), spread these norms across countries.  

This study furthers the existing literature by studying the determinants of domestic human rights legislation. The existing literature has mainly used international treaty (ratification) as a tool to measure human rights. The weakness of that approach is that the act of signing a treaty in itself does not come with strong enforcement mechanisms, and there is thus often a large discrepancy between promises made in the international arena and actual behaviour ‘at home’.  The incorporation of human rights elements in national law, where concrete political and legal compliance mechanisms do exist, signals a more credible commitment to these rights.

Methods and materials: The study is conducted at the country level, including all low and middle income countries. We look at two socio-economic rights separately: the right to education and the right to gender equality in labour. Both are championed by the international development community, but while the former is expected to be uncontroversial domestically, the latter might face religious and/or cultural resistance.

A new measure will be developed which scores the human rights content of existing education and labour legislation in each country, using the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and its General Comments as a benchmark. Data for education law is based on the WORLD Policy Analysis Centre dataset, while data for labour laws is based on the World Bank Women, Business and the Law unit.

This score will serve as the dependent variable in standard regression analysis. The will of the populace is proxied by its opinion on education and female labour, based on data from value surveys. The influence of the international community is proxied by two variables: the number of international human rights treaties which the state has ratified, and its participation in lending programs from international financial institutions.  

Goals and poster presentation: We empirically contribute to the debate on whether human rights are primarily a top-down or bottom-up project, and provide a new measure to assess domestic human rights legislation. The poster will detail the method of the analysis, the results obtained, as well as a discussion of their implications.