Following the Flag or Following the Money? The Economic and Military Linkages that Affect Amnesty International s Targets for Advocacy Campaigns

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1 Following the Flag or Following the Money? The Economic and Military Linkages that Affect Amnesty International s Targets for Advocacy Campaigns Cullen S. Hendrix University of North Texas cullen.hendrix@unt.edu Wendy H. Wong University of Toronto wendyh.wong@utoronto.ca Prepared for the International Political Economy Society meeting, November 12-13, DRAFT please do not cite/circulate

2 Amnesty International is a worldwide movement of people who campaign for internationally recognized human rights to be respected and protected for everyone. We believe human rights abuses anywhere are the concern of people everywhere Our mission is to conduct research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights and to demand justice for those whose rights have been violated We do not support or oppose any government or political system and neither do we necessarily support or oppose the views of the victims/survivors or human rights defenders whose rights we seek to protect Introduction Human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) commit themselves to revealing the violations of the world s human rights offenders. Statements such as the one above echo human rights NGOs positioning as omnibus, impartial reporters of the global human rights situation. Using tactics such as public naming and shaming and lobbying and negotiating behind closed doors, NGOs seek to bring state behavior into compliance with international human rights norms. As organizations with limited resources, however, NGOs must often make tough choices that in fact contradict their self-purported images of unbiasedness. 2 Since they cannot realistically take on all of the world s human rights violations with equal vigor, resources, and attention, NGOs make strategic and tactical decisions about what issues to prioritize and which countries deserve their focus. These choices may rest on agreed-on organizational prerogatives, or there may be directives from donors (states, intergovernmental organizations, foundations) that prioritize certain issues or regions for NGOs. In this paper, we are interested in two different types of choices NGOs make. The first is the decision to target states with its advocacy campaigns. NGOs can target violator governments with naming and shaming campaigns, or they can target other states and intergovernmental organizations. 3 Another option is to try to rally individuals within states to take action against their governments. This choice of target is critical in terms of NGO strategy, and is part of answering a larger question that others have tackled: what is the best way to stop human rights violations? The second decision NGOs must make after selecting their targets is the choice of advocacy tactic. A primary method is using the naming and shaming technique. There are several ways to publicly condemn states for human rights violations. Two main methods are issuing reports and press releases, which are indirect communication efforts. Some NGOs are also able to mobilize constituents in various countries to protest the actions of their own or other governments, thus pressuring state action through citizen engagement and direct communication. Some NGOs choose to lobby states behind closed doors or in the hallways of the United Nations and other institutions. 1 About Amnesty International (Accessed October 30, 2010). 2 Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, for instance, are constantly attacked as anti-israeli. See NGO Monitor: 3 Keck and Sikkink

3 We focus on the targeting strategies and tactical choices of one NGO in this analysis, Amnesty International. Given its international preeminence, its long-standing commitment to using naming and shaming tactics, and its global presence (2.8 million members in 150 countries, 80 offices around the world), 4 Amnesty has a long track record. Amnesty has also been recognized as playing a defining role in what we have come to understand as human rights. Its reports are used as the basis of the major quantitative measures of human rights, the CIRI and Political Terror datasets, used by human rights scholars. 5 The US State Department uses Amnesty s reports to inform its own reports on other states human rights performance. 6 How Amnesty presents human rights violations forms the basis for how we have come to view human rights since its first global campaign against torture in Because Amnesty s work fundamentally shapes how human rights are viewed today from a policy, ideational, and scholarly perspective, it is critical that we understand the factors that affect Amnesty s choice of government targets and whether different political, economic, and social concerns drive their different advocacy tactics. Amnesty is also unique among leading human rights NGOs in that the membership is actively engaged in its political action and that membership participates in biennial policymaking meetings. 7 In addition to issuing background and country reports and press releases, Amnesty also promotes its human rights agenda through the use of direct methods of communicating with governments, asking its members to write letters in protest of government abuses via its program of Urgent Action (UA). UAs, which began in 1973, are designed to be rapid responses to imminent threats to life or wellbeing, asking thousands of volunteers around the world to write in support of individual(s) cases. Thus, in every case it takes on, Amnesty must decide whether to use indirect tactics, such as background reports or press releases, and/or direct tactics by mobilizing UA campaigns. We concentrate on two choices NGOs make for every human rights issue they take on: targets and tactics. NGOs strive to be independent in an effort to distance themselves from the governments they criticize, and Amnesty has maintained such an image throughout its history. 8 Because Amnesty relies mostly on donations from its membership, it is not beholden to states, and can determine its agenda based on its organizational priorities. Nonetheless, we theorize that in fact state politics play a non-trivial role in Amnesty s decision to 1) target a given state and 2) what kinds of tactics they use in those cases. Similar to other transnational NGOs, Amnesty is composed of many national sections, some of which are nominally present with low membership (mostly in the developing world) and others that are much larger, richer, and have high membership levels. In the case of Amnesty, historically and contemporarily, the sections in the United Kingdom and the United States have been among the most vocal and engaged sections. 9 These sections reflect national political concerns in their approach to human rights advocacy. Because the membership contributes to the policy decisions of the NGO, we argue that 4 Amnesty International in your Country (Accessed October 30, 2010). 5 Cingranelli and Richards 1999, Wood and Gibney forthcoming. 6 Cingranelli and Richards 2001, Poe, et al Amnesty International s Statute (Accessed October 30, 2010). 8 Winston 2001, Hopgood The others are in Europe: the Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden. 3

4 Amnesty s targeting and tactical decisions will be influenced not just by the characteristics of human rights violations and the attributes of the states that perpetrate them, but will also be shaped by broader international relations as transmitted by their national sections. We develop a theoretical framework that explains the decision to target, and the decision of whether to use direct or indirect communication. These decisions are modeled as a function political and economic considerations as well as the extent of human rights abuses. We theorize that Amnesty s membership-driven agenda and the significance of diplomatic leverage in indirect shaming methods incentivizes it to focus efforts on countries with significant military and economic ties to the US and the UK. Moreover, when the mode of communication is direct, as with UAs, the level of political democracy should affect targeting levels, though in counterintuitive ways: democracies should be targeted less than non-democracies, as democracies are more immune to international audience costs. Using data on Amnesty s background reports and press releases as well as UAs, we demonstrate 1) that political democracy is negatively associated with the level of targeting for direct communication (UAs), but not background reports and press releases, and 2) that military and economic linkages in particular, alliance membership with the US and trade flows to the US and UK increase the level of Amnesty reports and press releases and UAs targeting a country. We find some evidence that US arms transfers increase the level of targeting for UAs, and that geographic distance from the two country capitals has a significant impact as well. In addition to objective measures of need for advocacy (human rights conditions on the ground, population), military and economic linkages with the US seem to drive targeting and tactics for advocacy. It seems, then, that NGOs such as Amnesty follow both the flag (military linkages) and the money (trade linkages) when making organizational decisions about strategy and tactics. In the next section, we briefly review received wisdom on NGOs in human rights politics. To date, scant few studies have examined NGO targeting decisions. In the third section, we present our theory and hypotheses, which we ground in existing explanations of NGOs as resourcelimited organizations that use political economy approaches to understanding human rights targeting and tactical choices. The fourth section presents our analysis of how military and trade linkages affect Amnesty s decisions in targeting and tactics. We conclude with a discussion of how funding sources can change not just targeting priorities, but tactical decisions for transnational NGOs that seriously engage membership demands. 2. How NGOs Decide NGO strategy and tactics are largely neglected areas in mainstream international relations. Despite the growth of writings on NGOs in international politics, much of the attention has gone to evaluating NGO efficacy. Studies that have evaluated the effects of naming and shaming from a statistical perspective find that on the whole, such efforts are not uniformly fruitful, 10 though the source of the shaming matters. 11 Others, however, find that naming and shaming campaigns can work against government killing 12 and that both regime type and type of naming and 10 Hafner-Burton Franklin DeMeritt

5 shaming technique used by NGOs affects advocacy outcomes. 13 Regardless of support from practitioners, 14 large-n examinations of naming and shaming often dismiss the notion of the efficacy of naming and shaming efforts across the board. Case studies, however, demonstrate that the work of NGOs in revealing human rights atrocities has made a difference in several cases, mostly in Latin America, 15 but also in Africa and Asia in the influential volume on the spiral model. 16 As Hafner-Burton and Ron argue, this can be attributed to the different reasons that motivate qualitative versus quantitative scholars. 17 While statistical methods search for a generalizable pattern of cause and effect across a large number of cases, case study work has largely been done by scholars of a more constructivist persuasion, whose purpose is to find how ideas (such as human rights) have diffused. Thus, the efficacy of human rights NGOs can be seen as spreading the notion of rights, giving international organizations and states norms against torture, disappearances, and extrajudicial executions, 18 for instance, or in terms of empowering local entities with such language, rather than looking at whether NGOs campaigning efforts lead to direct state reactions. We can see that a rights discourse has spread, in some cases being co-opted by very different types of movements, sometimes for very different purposes, in the developing world. 19 More concretely, NGOs also affect how the media reports human rights violations. 20 One way that the literature has gone beyond thinking about NGO efficacy is in conceptualizing their political economy, treating them seriously as organizations that follow structural incentives. Cooley and Ron s seminal piece on NGO activity in Kyrgyzstan, DRC, and Bosnia demonstrates that NGOs respond not just to their moral imperatives, but to economic incentives, in some cases neglecting their official reasons to be in the field (e.g. helping refugees or prisoners of war) in order to establish a public image, or to grab funding. 21 Similarly, economic opportunities for NGOs, as well as a rising norm that accommodates NGOs as legitimate actors in international politics, has led to the growing importance of NGOs. 22 Comparatively few scholars have looked at NGOs as organizations making strategic and tactical decisions regarding the targets of their advocacy. Human rights NGOs are presumed to be doing good. 23 This is because NGOs are often lumped into a monolithic category of civil society actors, as scholars see NGOs as the backbone of global civil society. 24 The growth of NGO participation in international politics since the end of the Cold War has intensified this view. Furthermore, the most detailed studies of NGOs that do exist often study international NGOs singularly, focusing on the merits of one or two NGOs 25 in global civil society. While 13 Wong and Hendrix Roth 2004a, 2004b. 15 Brysk 1993, Sikkink 1993, Martin and Sikkink 1993, Lutz and Sikkink Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink Hafner-Burton and Ron Clark Khagram, Riker, and Sikkink 2002, Hertel 2007, Goodale and Merry Ramos, et al Cooley and Ron Reimann See Krause 2010 for similar critique of the humanitarian literature. 24 Lipschutz 1992, Wapner 1995, Keane For critical views, see Munck 2002, Amoore and Langley See the various case studies in Bornstein 2001, Welch 2001, Redfield 2005, Hopgood

6 these thorough treatments of one or two organizations yield valuable insights, they do not offer much in terms of generalizability, and the subjects of their inquiry are often the exception, rather than the rule. Others have broadened the scope of analysis by comparing multiple transnational sectors 26 or multiple transnational NGOs within a sector. 27 Some comparative analyses focus on how domestic movements try to rally the support of international NGOs, 28 thereby exploring the strategic decisions that NGOs make in building local partners. One aspect of strategic choice is the scope of topics chosen by the NGO for advocacy. Organizations consider the urgency of a particular case, but also the potential for the impact of its work on its reputation, organizational priorities, and human rights more broadly. 29 Critics of international NGOs have often relied upon exhortations of their neglect of certain kinds of issues that they feel should be included for consideration as human rights. 30 Major human rights NGOs, such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have certainly, until the recent decade, neglected economic, social, and cultural rights in favor of civil and political rights. 31 Defending these positions, NGO leaders often cite efficacy and limited resources and the need to be able to build a causal story around violations in order to generate support. 32 From these justifications, it is clear that Amnesty and Human Rights Watch spend a great deal of time as organizations thinking about the reach of their advocacy, the appropriateness of including new types of rights into their agendas, and how these issue-based choices affect their overall strategies. They also consider how these choices alter their repertoire of tactics, whether old ways, such as issuing reports or using direct communication, is still appropriate when thinking about different types of rights. In this paper, we contribute to the analysis of human rights NGOs as organizations, and argue that not only is the choice of issue area an important strategic decision, but which states they choose to target and with what methods is not a conclusion that flows simply from the urgency of certain human rights violations over others. In addition, the organization s political economy also contributes to decisions of international NGOs, particularly those with voting memberships that are spread around the globe. 3. A Political Economy Model of NGO Targeting NGOs have limited resources, and as a result, face a constant tradeoff in their work between scope and depth. They can try to cover all or nearly all instances of human rights abuse in the world, thus increasing the scope of their activities. Contrastingly, they can cover fewer cases more comprehensively, and thus, become more deeply immersed in a limited number of cases. Most NGOs likely select a middle strategy to capture some aspects of scope and depth. As such, the choice of target and tactic matter from an organizational economy perspective. NGOs will try to maximize the impact of their efforts, whether in terms of symbolic value (when NGOs attack the US on its use of the death penalty), generating broader support (press coverage, state 26 Murdie 2010, Stroup Simeant 2005, Wong Bob Ron, et al For example, see Bunch Roth 2004a, Chandhoke 2007, Goering Roth 2004a. 6

7 actions), or realizing policy change (getting law passed). Each of these efforts requires a choice of target(s) and tactic(s), which we argue shapes the type of naming and shaming we observe. Though our theory is generalizable, we apply it specifically to Amnesty in this paper. In Amnesty s case, it can choose from direct communication, which involve its UA letter-writing campaigns, or it can elect to use indirect communication by issuing reports and press releases in the hope of getting other actors (states, intergovernmental organizations, leaders) to shame human rights-violating states. NGOs as organizations In their article, Cooley and Ron (2002) argue that the proliferation of NGOs and donors in international politics has led to a multiple principals problem. NGOs must serve both populations they have identified as needing help (recipients) and their donors; they have two principals. For human rights NGOs, recipients are more appropriately conceived of as NGOs beneficiaries. These principals might have orthogonal objectives and interests, and NGOs must balance them both through their actions. Not only do NGOs have to be responsive to conditions on the ground, they also have to follow the dictates of their funders. In other words, NGOs are both morally and materially-motivated. 33 Our analysis takes this multiple principals problem as a starting point, although our objective is not the detailed principal-agent analysis in which Cooley and Ron engage. Instead, we take their fundamental insight that NGOs have multiple audiences to whom they must respond, and expand upon it to take into consideration the multiple audiences that NGOs target with advocacy. Similar to Cooley and Ron, we conceptualize NGOs as organizations with specific objectives that may be at odds with both recipients and donors. Human rights NGOs are interested in making a political impact, and can pursue this goal in several ways. Human rights NGOs are also interested (as organizations) in survival remaining financially solvent and efficacy changing the behavior of violator states. Thus, NGOs must balance its own organizational positioning interests with potential friction with donors and beneficiaries of their work. It is also important to push existing analysis beyond the relationship that NGOs have between their donors and beneficiaries to one that takes into account the structural factors that have encouraged the proliferation of such actors. Since the end of the Cold War, a market around NGOs has formed, and this market is linked to overall security and trade relationships pursued by states. Thus, as Reimann (2006) argues, the growth of European Union, bilateral aid, private foundations, and quasi-public agencies such as the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as UN-sponsored bodies for the protection of human rights, has encouraged the rise of NGOs and given them more expansive roles in international policy-making. We augment Reimann s claim about the top down view of the growth of global civil society by suggesting that the military and trade alliances of states also influences how NGOs make strategic and tactical choices within their own organizations. NGOs do not exist in an advocacy vacuum, and while the imminence of certain human rights violations certainly motivates their actions, the concern with efficacy drives NGOs to pursue targeting and tactical techniques that yield the most buck for the bang : the most membership support for a given advocacy project. 33 See Bloodgood 2010 for an analogy to interest groups. 7

8 Funding For the most part, as described by Cooley and Ron and others, NGOs receive funding from foundations, states, and intergovernmental agencies. Thus, NGOs are beholden to these (often) large donors, many of whom have increasingly stringent limits on what NGOs can do with their funds. 34 In the case of Amnesty, however, these constraints are somewhat different. Because Amnesty has generally refused donations from governments and foundations, it has relied upon its membership for financial support. 35 The International Secretariat in London, which is the global headquarters and nerve center for Amnesty s work, is funded through the contributions of its 52 national sections, mostly based in Europe and North America. Although the Statute does not allow for rich national sections to hijack the agenda of the NGO, a struggle between the Secretariat and the then-rapidly-expanding American section, AIUSA, in the 1980s led to some concessions by the international headquarters. 36 Similarly, other wealthy national sections, such as the Swedish, Dutch, British, and German groups, have exerted pressure on the Secretariat through policy demands or obstructions. In the 1970s, the decision to take on the death penalty as part of Amnesty s work, for example, was supported strenuously by the Swedes, but approached with much more reluctance by the UK section. 37 In the end, the NGO added death penalty to its list of rights, but there were protracted debates over it between various national sections. The national sections can also influence the Secretariat. In the 1970s, the cry went up for Amnesty to adopt LGBT rights as part of its mandate, and these were accepted after extended debate and resistance from non-western sections and the Secretariat, becoming part of the mandate in For Amnesty, the financial support that it receives from national sections is a central part of its identity, and plays a role in the decisions that it makes to take on certain human rights issues. Less obvious are the effects of political and economic ties of the governments of influential national sections that could affect Amnesty s advocacy campaigns. For example, we expect that members of the Israeli section will be swayed by the politics of their home governments, and likely advocate policies that are critical of Israel s close military alliance with the US. Other sections might bring human rights positions to the table that reflect their home governments patterns of trade. Since we know that in fact security and trade relationships are linked at the state level, 39 we might expect that activists at the sub-state level might link their protest of human rights practices based on things that they find objectionable in other policy areas. When thinking about national level contributions of Amnesty sections, we posit that in fact national sections are influenced by broader patterns of economics and politics. In effect, internationallevel decisions that Amnesty takes on in terms of selecting targets and tactics will reflect broader political economic structures in addition to perceived human rights need. National section pressures will be greater in Amnesty s case because it is a membership-driven and funded 34 In the humanitarian sector, see Barnett 2005, Welch 2001, Winston Under the leadership of International Executive Committee Chair Peter Duffy ( ), the Secretariat began developing its own means to fundraise, but this is a minor part of its finances. 36 See Hopgood Thompson See Report and Decisions of the 20 th International Council of Amnesty International, Yokohama, Japan, August 31-September 7, Gowa and Mansfield

9 organization, and thus these kinds of pressures will play a role in Secretariat-level decisions about targeting and tactics. Choosing targets and tactics: audiences and participants To effectively name and shame, NGOs must 1) target the appropriate audience(s) for their advocacy and 2) figure whether participatory or non-participatory tactics are most appropriate (or both). Generally speaking, an NGO assesses whether the violator state can be convinced to alter its behavior with action by the NGO itself, or if pressures from other actors, such as states or international institutions, might provide additional impetus for a state to stop its abusive practices. This is the selection of the relevant target. For Amnesty, these choices take place at the Secretariat. Though NGO efforts to directly target a government may lead to the revelation of abuse to other states, we seek to distinguish between the primary targets of NGO advocacy. Thus, targeting the violator government does not mean the process is airtight; other states might find out. Similarly, NGO targeting of other states or intergovernmental organizations through its advocacy is not designed to keep perpetrator states in the dark, and may in fact serve as a signal about the level of unacceptability of their behavior. Existing studies account for the latter pattern targeting other states/intergovernmental organizations but not the direct targeting of violator states by NGOs. Keck and Sikkink s boomerang pattern 40 provides a model for how indirect communication works. In their model, country A s domestic NGOs contact their international partners through their transnational advocacy network links. In turn, international NGOs pressure third-party states and intergovernmental organizations that human rights violations in country A. For Keck and Sikkink, the primary target of NGO advocacy is not the violator state, but other states and institutions. This paper includes both a conception of boomerang-type strategies, as well as targeting perpetrator states directly with NGO advocacy. Secondly, an NGO must decide whether a particular case or set of cases merits activating the membership in a participatory effort, or if the qualities of the issue demand more a more specialist, policy-oriented audience. Some violations may necessitate reporting from major international media as well. Though these choices are not mutually exclusive, speed is an essential part of the equation. Non-participatory tactics can be slower than participatory tactics. Reports, particularly for Amnesty, go through an exhaustive process of fact-checking that can drag on for months. 41 Press releases are usually less thoroughly researched, but still require documentation. Membership participation through UAs, on the other hand, was designed primarily to circumvent Amnesty s meticulous procedures. UAs are issued anytime there is a suspected human rights violation that could lead to imminent harm or death. They are quickly issued by the Secretariat to national sections, which then relay the message on to their letterwriting networks. The drawback to mobilizing the membership, of course, is that participation is subject to individual interest and the investment of a national section in pursuing a given case. This must be accounted for when deciding whether to use participatory tactics thus necessitating involving the membership and national sections or to pursue tactics that most require efforts from the London office. 40 Keck and Sikkink See Stroup 2010, Chapter 3. 9

10 The choices for broader or narrower audiences, as well as membership participation, are not mutually exclusive, as Amnesty s campaign against torture throughout the 1970s and 1980s illustrated. The NGO used all kinds of direct and indirect communication techniques to create an international ban on torture. It pioneered the UA method of mobilizing its membership, it issued the watershed Report on Torture, which was the first comprehensive account of torture practices in countries around the world, it issued press releases regarding specific systems of torture, and it pressured governments and the UN to create what eventually became the Convention against Torture (1984). 42 Most cases, however, do not involve such an array of efforts. Different communication techniques target different audiences, and the choice of these different targets is a crucial strategic decision. The choice to engage the membership in direct communication against violator states, or to use more indirect communications that demands condemnation is a tactical choice that stems from the Secretariat, and more specifically, a researcher s assessment of the human rights situation in-country, and what methods might be most effective for stopping abuses. Does the audience for publicizing state practices need to go beyond the government that is violating human rights? How recalcitrant or receptive is the violator state, and what kind of leverage do Western governments have over these countries? These questions inform an NGO s decision on how broadly to target its advocacy. We conceptualize the choice of target and tactic in the following way: TABLE 1 HERE As Table 1 shows, whether Amnesty employs direct or indirect communication involves both strategic and tactical calculations. It is a function of its strategic choice to target the violator government or not and a tactical decision to use the power of its membership or not. If the target is the perpetrator government, then factors that affect perceived receptiveness to direct communication should be correlated with targeting. If the target is not the perpetrator government, but Western media outlets, Western governments, etc., then factors that affect the perceived receptiveness of a government to NGO communication should not necessarily be correlated with targeting. In democracies and regimes with elections, officials suffer electorally if their actions are in conflict with their constituency s desires, or if they appear indecisive in their resolve. As such, democracies can anticipate potential audience costs and account for them in their decision-making, and thus, their intractability on issues such as the death penalty, in spite of repeated attempts by NGOs to change their behavior, is a function of both constituent preferences and political calculation. 43 Elected officials have already accounted for audience costs, and act on human rights (among other things) in accordance with those calculations. Thus, the fact that a democracy or hybrid regime engages in human rights violations may signal that the audience costs of doing so are in fact a net domestic benefit, and NGO criticism, especially international NGO condemnation, does not change these costs dramatically. The utility of the 42 For a full account, see Huckerby and Rodley This also accounts for instances where audiences costs appear not to work (Schultz 2001), as governments can anticipate them and act in preparation for possible audience costs. 10

11 information provided by an NGO may be limited as well in states with a relatively free media that already provides the citizenry with alternative sources. 44 Thus, we believe that regime type should be associated with targeting for UAs, but that autocracies should be more likely to be targeted than democracies. Democracies should be, on the whole, less receptive to NGO condemnation because they have already factored in the effect of abusing human rights before acting. H 1 : Political democracy will be negatively associated with the frequency with which a government is targeted via direct communication, ceteris paribus. On the other hand, the indirect forms of advocacy contends that Amnesty reporting activity is directed primarily to influencing Western governments so that they may press the human rights agenda via diplomatic channels. Because governments are presumed to have a greater number of policy instruments with which to influence other governments, the issue of domestic audience costs may be more highly correlated with the degree of influence that the Western governments in the present analysis, the US and the UK have over target governments. Thus, we would expect that indirect forms of communication would be more highly correlated with economic and military linkages that may give the US and UK governments leverage in pressing other countries for better human rights outcomes. However, our preceding theoretical discussion highlights the pressures on Amnesty as a membership-driven organization. Especially if the mode of advocacy is participatory, such as with UAs, Amnesty will have strategic incentives to target those countries that are of high salience to constituencies in powerful national sections. Thus, countries with stronger economic and military linkages should be targeted more frequently for direct communication as well. H 2 : Economic and military linkages with the US and UK will be positively associated with the frequency with which a government is targeted for both direct and indirect advocacy, ceteris paribus. 3. Data To investigate the regime-specific characteristics and economic and military linkages that may affect Amnesty s targeting of advocacy campaigns, we analyze a sample of 132 countries for the period , though the availability of independent and control variables sometimes restricts temporal and cross-section coverage. First, we discuss our operationalization of Amnesty targeting, our measures of regime characteristics and US/UK military and economic linkages, and our control variables. Second, we introduce our estimation strategy and present the findings of our statistical analyses. The Dependent Variables To measure Amnesty s indirect, reporting-based methods of advocacy, we use the annual count of Amnesty background reports and press releases published on a particular country. Ron, Ramos and Rodgers (2005) originally coded these data from the Amnesty International 44 Slantchev

12 Cumulative Guide ; while their original coding covered the period , the data have been coded back to 1975 (Hafner-Burton 2008). The country-year mean for Amnesty reporting is 3.58, though the data are skewed, with 44% of country-years not being targeted at all, and only 10% of country-years being targeted more than ten times. Descriptive statistics for all variables used in our analysis can be found in the appendix. To measure NGO direct advocacy, we use a new dataset of 12,865 UAs targeting 171 countries Direct communication with violator governments has long been Amnesty s claim to fame. The Secretariat issues UAs, based on assessments by the relevant regional research teams. Each UA counted in our data represents a dossier issued by the Secretariat to national-level offices that documents the name of the individual whose rights might have been abused, a description of known circumstances around his/her abuse, the government or actor that perpetrated the violation, and contact information for relevant officials that might be able to put an end to the abuses. Multiple UAs may be issued for a single individual; multiple individuals may be covered under any given UA. These dossiers are distributed at the national-level to interested individuals in the UA network, who then write letters in immediate response to the appeal the violations detailed in the dossier. The country-year mean of UAs is 2.42, though the data are skewed, with 40% UAs of country-years not being targeted at all, and only 5% of country-years being targeted more than ten times. 45 Amnesty reporting and UAs are relatively strongly correlated. This is to be expected, as both are measures of the concerns and priorities of the same organization; however, not all countries targeted for UAs are also targeted for Amnesty reporting and vice versa. We will investigate the particular mixture of indirect and direct communication that a country receives, what we call the repertoire of advocacy, in future research. The Independent Variables Regime Type Figure 1 HERE In order to operationalize regime type, we use the potential target country s revised combined Polity score, commonly referred to as Polity2. Polity2 subtracts the Polity AUTOC score from the DEMOC score, producing a 21-point scale ranging from 10 (strong democracies) to -10 (strong autocracies). Because we are interested in whether the effect of political democracy is curvilinear, i.e., that strong autocracies and strong democracies might display different dynamics than intermediate or hybrid regimes, we include the squared Polity2 term as well. 46 Security Linkages We use six variables to operationalize US and UK military linkages. The first two are US and UK arms transfers to potential target countries, measured in constant US dollars. Both the US and the UK are major exporters of small arms and heavy military equipment, with the US 45 For a more detailed discussion of UAs, see Wong and Hendrix (2009). 46 Marshall, Gurr and Jaggers

13 accounting for 40% of total sales, and the UK 7%, to developing nations from Because the variable captures arms transfers, rather than just sales, it captures the cumulative effect of sales, in-kind military aid, and aid that is tied to purchases of US and/or UK military hardware. Data are from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Arms Transfers Database, and values are log transformed. 48 The second two are US military alliance and UK military alliance, which are indicator variables taking on a value of one if the country has a formal military alliance with the US or the UK, respectively. 49 Finally, we use two variables to operationalize the similarity of a country s security and foreign policy interests to those of the US and UK beyond the mere existence or not of an alliance. To measure security interest congruence, we use Signorino and Ritter s (1999) policy portfolio similarity, or US and UK S scores. These measures use a combination of alliance membership patterns and United Nations voting data to produce a single measure, ranging from theoretically from 0 (no manifest interest commonality) to 1 (complete manifest interest commonality), on an annual basis. Economic Linkages Our approach to proxying economic linkages between potential target countries and the US and UK revolves around trade flows. We do not include measures of participation in free trade agreements, as bilateral and multilateral agreements that address trade do so ostensibly to increase flows between countries. To the extent that these treaties signal something other than increased volumes of trade, these effects will not be captured. If, however, we believe that the primary purpose of these agreements is to bolster trade, then trade flows should be a good overall proxy for the degree of economic linkage between countries. In our preliminary analyses, we included measures for overall trade flows (inflows + outflows), outflows (from country X to the US or UK) and inflows (from the US or UK to country X). 50. For reasons to be addressed in the discussion, we focus on trade outflows flows from potential target countries to the US and UK. The two variables, trade to US and UK, are log transformed. The two variables are highly correlated (r = 0.90), introducing a problematic level of collinearity into the models. To address this problem, I regress trade to the US on trade to the UK, and the total revenue residuals from that regression are included as the control for trade to the UK. The highest residuals (trade to the UK predicted trade to the UK, given trade to the US) belong to countries that have been the subject of US trade embargoes, such as Libya, Iraq and Iran, while the lowest residuals belong to many former Soviet Republics. By construction, the residuals of total revenue are uncorrelated with the tax ratio. We plan to incorporate foreign aid disbursements, 51 bilateral stocks and flows of FDI, bilateral investment treaties and trade agreements, 52 and participation in IMF structural adjustment programs 53 into future iterations of the paper. Geographic Proximity 47 Grimmett SIPRI Leeds, et al Data are from Barbieri, Keshk and Pollins Lebovic and Voeten Hafner-Burton Abouharb and Cingranelli

14 Finally, we include measures of geographic proximity. We use distance from US and UK capital, which is simply the distance, in kilometers, from the potential target country s capital city to Washington, DC, and London, respectively. The effect of geographic proximity is an important variable for political change. Spatial-dependence has been found to influence rates of diffusion of market economies and democratic governments in the post-soviet states. 54 Controls The most important controls in our model are the level of human rights abuses, population, and geographic proximity. If the purposes of Amnesty targeting is to name human rights abuse and shame abusers into curbing these abuses, we would expect that Amnesty would target countries with worse human rights records more often. To this end, we include two operationalizations of aggregate levels of respect for human rights. The first, the CIRI Physical Integrity Index, measures the rights not to be tortured, summarily executed, disappeared, or imprisoned for political beliefs. 55. The index ranges from 0 (no government respect for these rights) to 8 (full government respect for these rights). The second, the Political Terror Scale, measures levels of political violence, and ranges from 5 ( Terror has expanded to the whole population. The leaders of these societies place no limits on the means or thoroughness with which they pursue personal or ideological goals ) to 1 ( Countries under a secure rule of law, people are not imprisoned for their views, and torture is rare or exceptional. Political murders are extremely rare ). 56 In order for results to be comparable across the measures, we use the inverse of the PTS in our analyses, so that higher values represent greater respect for human rights. Both codings are based on Amnesty country reports and U.S. State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, and are highly correlated (ρ = 0.85). 57 Second, our models include controls for population (logged), as we expect larger countries to be targeted more often. There are several reasons why we expect this to be the case. First, regarding background reports and press releases, larger countries, ceteris paribus, should provide more bang for the buck : a background report on Equatorial Guinea, with a population of just over 1 million, illuminates the adverse conditions of fewer people than a similar report targeting China. Regarding UAs, larger countries, for any level of aggregate respect for human rights, will have more individuals that would be potential targets for individual abuse. We expect that these two variables should be highly significant, as they represent the most objective, non-political factors that would condition human rights reporting and advocacy: the extent of the abused and the number of abused. Third, we control for geographic proximity. Trade flows are highly negatively correlated with geographic proximity: countries tend to be more economically linked to their neighbors than to distant lands. 58 Moreover, there it is plausible that military linkages are more common with neighbors than with far-flung countries, and general country salience is likely a function of 54 Kopstein and Reilly Cingranelli and Richards Wood and Gibney forthcoming. 57 For detailed discussions of the similarities and differences between the measures, see Wood and Gibney (forthcoming).. 58 Bergstrand 1985, Frankel and Romer 1999, 14

15 distance as well. Including the capital-city-to-capital-city distance to the US and distance to UK will allow us to discern empirically the effect of trade and military alliance from more general proximity effects. We control for level of economic development with real GDP per capita (logged) 59 and a control for the incidence of civil conflict, as governments fighting internal wars have been demonstrated to perform significantly worse in respecting human rights, and as such may draw increased scrutiny. 60 We include a control for peace years, a count variable of the years a country has been at peace, as we expect that Amnesty attention should decrease the longer a country experiences domestic peace. Finally, we include a time trend to account for any general linear trend in AI s reporting and UA activity over the sample period. 4. Estimation and Results Because the distributions of the dependent variables, Amnesty reporting and UAs, are highly skewed, we use negative binomial regression. Negative binomial models are similar to other event count models, such as Poisson regression, but are more appropriate for over-dispersed data. The interpretation of coefficient estimates for negative binomial models is not intuitive: for a one unit change in the independent variable, the log of expected counts of the dependent variable is expected to change by the regression coefficient, given the other independent variables in the model are held constant. As with other maximum likelihood estimators, the magnitude of the marginal effect is contingent on the values of all independent variables of interest. In order to address cross-country heteroskedasticity, we estimate Huber-White robust standard errors clustered on countries. We estimate models with and without lagged dependent variables. Our theory is not truly dynamic, in the sense that reporting and/or UA targeting at time t is not necessarily a function of reporting and advocacy efforts at t However, both Amnesty reporting and UAs are highly autocorrelated (r = 0.81 and r = 0.83, respectively), and as such concerns about autocorrelation are warranted. Thus, we report estimates for both. 62 All control variables are lagged one year. TABLE 2 HERE Table 2 reports negative binomial estimates of Amnesty reporting from Models 1 and 2 control for levels of human rights abuses using the CIRI physical integrity rights index (PHYSINT), while models 3 and 4 use the Political Terror Scale. Models 1 and 3 do not include a lagged dependent variable, while models 2 and 4 do. Table 3 reports estimates of identical models estimating the determinants of targeting for UAs, with models 5 and 6 controlling for levels of human rights abuses using the CIRI physical integrity rights index (PHYSINT), while models 7 and 8 use the Political Terror Scale. Models 5 and 7 do not include a lagged dependent variable, while models 6 and 8 do. 59 Data are from Gleditsch Poe and Tate 1994, Poe, Tate and Keith Keele and Kelly Results using population-averaged generalized estimating equation models with AR1 correlated errors were similar to those reported here. 15

16 TABLE 3 HERE Four main findings emerge from these results. First, consistent with our theoretical expectations, regime type matters for advocacy efforts that directly target violator states UAs but not for advocacy efforts targeted primarily at Western governments and media outlets Amnesty reporting. The coefficients on Polity2 and Polity2 squared are uniformly statistically significant and negative across models 5-8, but uniformly insignificant in models 1-4. Regime type exerts no statistically significant effect on targeting for background reports and press releases. Regarding UAs, the negative coefficient on both the first order and squared terms indicate a curvilinear dynamic: Amnesty targets intermediate or hybrid regimes 63 the most, strong autocracies somewhat less, and full democracies the least. Because estimated negative binomial coefficients are difficult to interpret and marginal effects are contingent on the values of other independent variables in the model, we use CLARIFY in order to estimate the marginal effects of our variables of interest. 64 Figure 2 depicts this curvilinear relationship. Amnesty targeting for UAs peaks between Polity2 scores of -4 and -2, which correspond to hybrid regimes. Amnesty targeting for UAs is lowest among full democracies: regimes with a Polity2 score of 10 are targeted 77 percent fewer times than regimes with a score of -3. While full autocracies are targeted less than hybrid regimes, they are targeted more frequently than full democracies (full autocracies are targeted almost three times as much as full democracies (187.4%). These findings square with our recent analysis, which indicates that Amnesty targets autocracies more often than non-autocracies, and is more successful in their attempts to improve human rights practices through shaming in autocracies. 65 Second, reporting and urgent actions follow military alliance patterns, with US allies being targeted more and UK allies less. The coefficients on US alliance are consistently positive in models 1-8, and statistically significant (p < 0.05) in six of the eight specifications. Holding values of other variables constant at their median values, being in a military alliance with the US increases the number of expected Amnesty reports by an average of 79.1% (from 2.85 to 5.19), and UAs by an average of 49.6%, across the reported specifications. However, the marginal effect on UAs should be viewed with caution, as the result is only statistically significant in the specifications including a lagged dependent variable. The marginal effect of being a UK ally, holding the effect of US alliance patterns constant, is roughly a halving of the expected number of Amnesty reports and UAs. The large effects are likely due to the prevalence of US military alliances among Latin American and Asian countries, many of which have had historically poor human rights records. Latin America has been recognized as one of AI s primary areas of interest (Clark 2001). The results on alliance affinity are both large and highly statistically significant, yet their interpretation warrants some caution. The results indicate that alliance affinity with both the US and the UK strongly predict targeting, but in opposite directions: alliance affinity with the US 63 Those regimes that intermingle authoritarian (such as self-selection of the executive) and democratic (some liberalization of the party system or some checks on executive authority) institutions. 64 King, Tomz and Wittenberg Wong and Hendrix