Search

To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2478.2010.00631.x Byline: Patrick Bernhagen (*), Neil J. Mitchell ([dagger]) Abstract: We examine the commitments of transnational corporations to human rights, labor, environmental, and anti-corruption standards. Modeling commitment as a function of the nature of the firm's business activities and conditioned by neighborhood and audience contexts, we investigate adherence to the principles entailed in the UN Global Compact program by the world's 2000 largest companies. Our results suggest that the decisions to participate in and to take steps to comply with the Global Compact are influenced by the characteristics of the firm as it adapts to its institutional and political environment. Signing up to the program increases the likelihood of firms developing human rights-related company policies and receiving positive external assessments of their performance. Author Affiliation: (*)University of Aberdeen and Center for the Study of Civil War, PRIO ([dagger])University of Aberdeen

Sexual violence is a category of human rights violation and the article discusses sexual violence committed by government security forces focusing on the issue of delegation.

Democracy and the protection of human fights generally go together, but not in India. India is an outlier in the cross-national research that aims to explain human rights performance. Using state-level subnational data and drawing on the approaches pioneered at the cross-national level, the authors examine the reasons for the outlier status. Their findings suggest that the aggregate wholenation human rights and democracy scores misrepresent the political experience of much of India. The authors find that participation, political parties, and the level and nature of opposition threat help us understand the incidence of human rights violations within India. Keywords: India; human rights; subnational politics; elections

The lobbying practices of foreign business interests in the US are investigated to determine if foreign-owned firms follow the political practices in their home countries or if they adapt to those of the host country. Data on political action committee allocation strategies during the 1987-88 election period show that foreign companies adapt to the political economy of the host country.

This article examines business donations to the Conservative Party during the Thatcher era. It argues that these donations cannot be treated as equivalent to PAC (political action committee) contributions in the United States. On the basis of data collected for the largest 500 British firms, the article argues that beyond market characteristics, it is also important to look at the motivations of businessmen and what the party can do to encourage donations. This represents an alternative explanation to Useem's influential inner circle thesis for why firms contribute to the Conservative Party.

The relationship of government and insurgent violence and also how it is modified by differences in geography and by differences in the local political and social context are investigated using the data from the conflict in Nepal. The results show that an involved citizenry, as measured by participation and social capital, can prevent conflict and create conditions where it is less likely for government forces or insurgents to select violence.

Why does the relationship between a government and its citizens deteriorate to violence? Large-N cross-national quantitative analyses of human rights violations have found an inverse relationship between democracy and violations. These analyses, however, have not been able to address the central finding of an influential subnational analysis of democracy that stresses the importance of a single dimension of democracy, social capital. In this article we combine these two streams of research with fresh data from the Mexican states to investigate how and why democracy inhibits violations. Theoretically, we connect a policy interest in protecting human rights to politicians' office-seeking goals and to the level of social capital. Empirically, our data allow us to disentangle two principal components of democracy, elections and social capital, and include important control variables, notably ethnic diversity, which have been largely left out of the cross-national analyses. Our central finding is that the electoral components rather than social capital produce important consequences for the protection of citizens' human rights.

An analysis of the distribution and structure of mass public beliefs related to nuclear security and nuclear energy issues in the United States and Great Britain is presented. Findings provide evidence of a hierarchical model of policy beliefs with differential adjustments based on situational conditions and raise questions about the kind of geopolitical and institutional conditions.

The authors seek to explain the membership of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus (CHRC). Focusing on human rights violations abroad, the Caucus offers few incentives for representatives to join this organization, yet it consistently has a large membership. Drawing on theoretical literature on Congress and interest groups, the authors argue that members' policy motivation and the subsidizing role of national and transnational human rights interest groups account for the decision to join. Documentary and interview evidence for House members in the 107th and 108th Congresses support these arguments. The results have substantive and theoretical implications for the study of the CHRC, the interactions between members of Congress and interest groups, and the study of congressional caucuses generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The commitment to human rights goals is an explicit and well-publicized feature of U.S. foreign policy. U.S. human rights policy performance is evaluated by examining the relationship between the distribution of U.S. foreign assistance and the human rights records of recipient countries. This study, in addition to including more recent data for a larger number of countries, goes beyond earlier studies by comparing the degree of human rights violations between recipients and nonrecipients of U.S. aid and by comparing the performance of those countries that receive a large amount of U.S. assistance and those that do not. The consistent finding of the various analytical approaches used in this paper is that stated human rights policy goals are not being achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]