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Making Promises, Keeping Promises: Democracy, Ratification and Compliance in International Human Rights Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2015

Jana von Stein
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Abstract

This article argues that in order to understand how international human rights agreements (HRAs) work, scholars need to turn their attention to rights that are not definitional to democracy. When rights practices diverge from treaty rules, but the domestic enforcement mechanisms that give such agreements their bite are robust, how do governments behave? The study explores this question by examining a core treaty that prohibits child labor. When domestic enforcement is likely, states where many children work are often deterred from ratifying. Nevertheless, those that do ratify experience significant child labor improvements. By contrast, in non-democracies, ratification is a promise that is easily made but seldom kept.

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Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , July 2016 , pp. 655 - 679
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

Political Science and International Relations Programme, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand (email: jana.vonstein@vuw.ac.nz). For helpful comments and support, I thank Bill Clark, Courtenay Conrad, Sarah Croco, Carlen Fifer, Emilie Hafner-Burton, Tim Howard, Barb Koremenos, Shaun McGirr, Jim Morrow, Will Moore, Jon Pevehouse, Ken Schultz, Greta Snyder and Gail Wright. I gratefully acknowledge research support from the University of Michigan’s Center for International and Comparative Studies and its Center for Political Studies. This article is dedicated to the memory of Sophie Salmond. Data replication sets and online appendices are available at http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1017/S0007123414000489.

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