Crafting Reputation before Domestic and International Audiences: Autocratic Participation in the United Nations Human Rights Institutions.

Abstract

Why do some autocracies actively participate in international human rights institutions while their autocratic peers prefer to keep their engagement at a minimum? I argue that autocrats are motivated to participate by a desire to craft good reputations before domestic and international audiences. Hampered by commitment and information problems in their power-sharing relationship with ruling coalitions, autocrats with different support bases from their predecessors seek popular support to deter potential challenges from their new allies. Such autocrats find multiple ratifications of human rights agreements (HRAs) an expedient policy tool either to signal a break from their repressive autocratic predecessors or to reassure citizens by demonstrating continuity with their democratic predecessors in human rights protections. Among many other liberalization policies under autocrats, HRA memberships help governments appear to care for “broad interests” while still granting concentrated benefits to a small circle of regime insiders. Such autocrats make their promises more credible by accepting extra monitoring/enforcement procedures in addition to ratifying the main treaty, as long as the treaties concern general rights protections and allow them some control over those procedures. Likewise, autocracies actively engage in the Universal Periodic Review when seeking an enhanced reputation on human rights, either on their own or in relation to a particular state under review, in the eyes of the international audience. In particular, autocratic states with high profile positions in other international human rights institutions issue more meaningful recommendations to peer states. Autocracies also issue more serious recommendations to their foreign policy adversaries. Last, the meaningful recommendations issued by autocratic states mostly refer to international HRAs, but stop short of encouraging specific domestic reforms, as the recommending autocracy commits to a higher number of HRAs. I find strong supporting evidence in a series of empirical analyses based on a newly created dataset of individual autocrats’ records of ratification and acceptance of optional monitoring/enforcement of core UN HRAs from 1966 to 2008 and on a newly created directed dyadic dataset on UPR recommendations from 2008 to 2011. Qualitative data from elite interviews and site observation further corroborate the main findings.