Publications by Author: Beth%20A.%20Simmons

Human rights treaty bodies have for many years now been criticized as useless and self-reporting widely viewed as a whitewash. Yet very little research explores what, if any, influence this periodic review process has on governments’ implementation of and compliance with treaty obligations. We argue oversight committees may play an important role by providing information for international and domestic audiences. This paper examines the effects of self-reporting and oversight review, using original data on the quality and responsiveness of reports submitted to the Committee Against Torture (CmAT) and a dynamic approach to strengthen causal inference about the effects of the periodic review process on rights practices. We find that the review process in fact does reduce the incidence of torture in self-reporting states. Furthermore, we find that local media attention to the process in Latin American spikes during the review process, consistent with domestic awareness and mobilization made possible by media attention to torture practices and treaty obligations. Thus, this is the first study to present positive evidence on the effects of self-reporting on torture outcomes, contrary to the many studies that assert the process is basically useless.

Education ministers across the globe quake in the run-up to the publication, every three years, of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which rates 15-year-olds’ academic performance in dozens of countries. Those that do well can expect glory; the first PISA ranking, published in 2001, surprised the world by putting unshowy Finland near the top in every subject and made it a mandatory stop-off for any self-respecting education policymaker. Germany’s poor showing, by contrast, led to national hand-wringing, school reforms and the creation of a €4 billion ($5 billion) federal education support programme.

The regime for international investment is extraordinary in public international law and controversial in many regions of the world. This article explores two aspects of this set of rules: its decentralization and the unusual powers it gives to private actors to invoke dispute settlement. Decentralization has contributed to a competitive environment for ratification of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) and has elevated the importance of dyadic bargaining power in the formation of the regime. Governments of developing countries are more likely to enter into BITs and tie their hands more tightly when they are in a weak bargaining position, which in turn is associated with economic downtowns of the domestic economy. Once committed, investors have sued governments with surprising regularity, arguably contributing disproportionately to legal awards that favor the private corporate actors who have the power to convene the dispute settlement system. One of the conclusions is that it is important not only to consider whether BITs attract capital - which hs been the focus of nearly all the empirical research on BIT effects - but also to investigate the governance consequences of the international investment regime generally.

This Article examines the adoption of rights in national constitutions in the post-World War II period in light of claims of global convergence. Using a comprehensive database on the contents of the world's constitutions, we observe a qualified convergence on the content of rights. Nearly every single right has increased in prevalence since its introduction, but very few are close to universal. We show that international rights documents, starting with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, have shaped the rights menu of national constitutions in powerful ways. These covenants appear to coordinate the behavior of domestic drafters, whether or not the drafters' countries are legally committed to the agreements (though commitment enhances the effect). Our particular focus is on the all-important International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, whose ratification inclines countries towards rights they, apparently, would not otherwise adopt. This finding confirms the complementary relationship between treaty ratification and domestic constitutional norms, and suggests that one important channel of treaty efficacy may be through domestic constitutions.

NYU Law's symposium "From Rights to Reality: Mobilizing for Human Rights and Its Intersection with International Law" has been a valuable opportunity to reflect on the role that international law has played in the furtherance of human rights around the world over the past six decades. It has also been a stimulating forum to assess the state of our knowledge, experience, and research relating to the development of human rights law and its application in various settings around the world. The scholars and practitioners participating in this symposium have each made remarkable contributions to the development, interpretation, and application of human rights law internationally, and I am very grateful that they have taken the time to engage the arguments and evidence in Mobilizing for Human Rights. The editors of the Journal of International Law and Politics are to be congratulated on a stimulating symposium and a valuable volume.

In this concluding article, I will describe what Mobilizing for Human Rights set out to do, what I think it did well, and what it did not, in the end, accomplish. There is much to mention on both scores. While the book was one of the first comprehensive efforts to theorize and test empirically the effects of international legal agreements on a broad range of rights indicators, the research necessarily fails to speak to some issues, raises additional questions, and opens up new avenues for empirical research. I will also engage the observations of my colleagues in the symposium, whose supportive as well as skeptical views I very much appreciate. I hope to make clearer how the research potentially connects with strategies for rights improvements. I conclude on a very humble note: the experience represented by the symposium participants far outstrips the scholarly findings of the book, but I am hopeful that discussion of the kind we have had leads both to better scholarship and broadly informed practice.

Proponents and opponents of ratification of the ICESCR‟s Optional Protocol have both exaggerated the consequences of giving individuals a “private right of standing” before the Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights. But this article argues that, on balance, ratification should be encouraged. Individuals will bring new and urgent issues to the international agenda, and the dialog will help to encourage a better sense of states‟ international legal obligations under the treaty. The consequences for ESC rights are likely to be modestly positive, if outcomes under the OP of the ICCPR are any guide. Even states that already respect ESC rights in their domestic law should ratify, because there is a tendency, judging by the ratification behaviour relating to similar agreements, for states to emulate ratification practices of other states in their region. Ratification will neither end deprivation nor damage the credibility of the international legal system. It will be a modest step forward in consensus-formation of the meaning of ESC rights, which in turn is a positive step toward their ultimate provision.

This volume argues that international human rights law has made a positive contribution to the realization of human rights in much of the world. Although governments sometimes ratify human rights treaties, gambling that they will experience little pressure to comply with them, this is not typically the case. Focusing on rights stakeholders rather than the United Nations or state pressure, Beth Simmons demonstrates through a combination of statistical analyses and case studies that the ratification of treaties leads to better rights practices on average. Simmons argues that international human rights law should get more practical and rhetorical support from the international community as a supplement to broader efforts to address conflict, development, and democratization.

Appendices for the book are available below for download:

• APP_3.1_Survival_curves.pdf 
• APP_3.2_Ratification_rules.pdf
• APP_3.3_Robustness_checks_-_ratification.pdf
• APP_3.4_British_insts_correlation.pdf
• APP_3.5_Reservations_Appendix_-_top_5x6.pdf
• APP_3.6_UN_Conferences.pdf
• APP_5.1_Intl_ags_-_admin_of_justice_.pdf
• APP_5.2_Death_Pen_-_IV_probit_2000_.pdf
• APP_7.1_UN_investigations.pdf
• APP_7.2__High_volatility_regimes.pdf
• APP_7.3_Chilean_court_cases.pdf
• APP_7.4_Israeli_court_cases.pdf

With Daniel Hopkins. American Political Science Review (forthcoming, August 2005)

We acknowledge the contribution of von Stein (200X) in calling attention to the very real problem of selection bias in estimating treaty effects. Nonetheless, we dispute both von Stein?s theoretical and empirical conclusions. Theoretically, we contend that treaties can both screen and constrain simultaneously, meaning that findings on screening do nothing to undermine the claim that treaties constrain state behavior as well. Empirically, we questions von Stein?s estimator on several grounds, including its strong distributional assumptions and its statistical inconsistency. We then illustrate that selection bias does not account for much of the difference between Simmons? (2000) and von Stein?s (200x) estimated treaty effects, and instead reframe the problem as one of model dependency. Using a preprocessing matching step to reduce that dependency, we then illustrate treaty effects that are both substantively and statistically significant – and that are quiet close in magnitude to those reported by Simmons (2000).

One of the most important developments over the past three decades has been the spread of liberal economic ideas and policies throughout the world. These policies have affected the lives of millions of people, and yet our most sophisticated political economy models do not adequately capture influences on these policy choices. Evidence suggests that the adoption of liberal economic practices is highly clustered both temporally and spatially. We hypothesize this clustering might be due to processes of policy diffusion. We think of diffusion as resulting from one of two broad sets of forces: one in which mounting adoptions of a policy alter the benefits of adopting for others, and another in which adoptions provide policy relevant information about the benefits of adopting. We develop arguments within these broad classes of mechanisms, construct appropriate measures of the relevant concepts, and test their effects on liberalization and restriction of the current account, the capital account, and the exchange rate regime. Our findings suggest that domestic models of foreign economic policymaking are insufficient. The evidence shows that policy transitions are influenced by international economic competition as well as the policies of a country?s socio–cultural peers. We interpret this latter influence as a form of channeled learning reflecting governments? search for appropriate models for economic policy.

In Dinah Shelton (ed.) Commitment and Compliance: The Role of Non–binding Norms in the International Legal System. Oxford University Press, 2000, 244–263

The explosion of international financial activity over the last decade has been a central fact of international economic life. Balance of payments statistics indicate that cross–border transactions in bonds and equities for the G–9 states rose from less than 10 percent of gross domestic product in 1980 to over 140 percent in 1995. International bond markets have reached staggering proportions: by the end of 1995, some US$2.803 trillion of international debt securities were outstanding worldwide. Capital flows to developing countries and countries in transition grew from US$57 billion in 1990 to over US$211 billion in 1995. Foreign lending in form of international syndicated credit facilities has surged since the 1980s, to over US$320 billion at the end of 1995. Foreign exchange transactions – which represent the world?s largest market – reached an estimated average daily turnover of nearly US$1.2 trillion in 1995 compared to US$590 billion daily turnover in 1989.

Ch. 2 in John Stephens, Herbert Kitschelt, Peter Lange, and Gary Marks (eds.), Change and Continuity in Contemporary Capitalism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 36–69

The internationalization and integration of capital markets has been the most significant change in the political economy of the industrialized countries over the past three decades. From the Great Depression to the Bretton Woods period, capital markets developed largely within national boundaries. Yet the past three decades have witnessed historically unprecedented growth in cross–border capital movements that have surpassed those of the late nineteenth century, often thought of as a golden age of international finance. Moreover, since World War II, the integration of capital markets has been far more rapid and complete among the industrialized countries than has the integration of markets for goods and services. No other area of the economy has been so thoroughly internationalized as swiftly as have capital markets since the 1970s.