Feed the World: The Impact of High-Profile Activism on INGO Effectiveness (Note: paper withdrawn due to limits on number of appearances by an author.).

What are the most effective ways of heightening the public and media salience of human rights issues in an era when security concerns habitually are granted top billing? In this paper, I examine one way that international human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) attempt to mobilize public opinion in democratic societies. Such NGOs attempt to draw attention to human rights abuses abroad in order to increase the salience of such issues to the voting public in such a way that electoral pressures can be brought to bear on the leadership of democratic major power states ? states that may have the ability to influence human rights abroad. Related research has demonstrated that domestic politics can influence the extent to which donor states incorporate human rights into their foreign aid policy.In recent years, one of the ways that NGOs have most successfully drawn public attention to human rights abuses has been to enlist the help of celebrity spokespersons. These high-profile representatives by definition command a degree of media coverage and public attention that rivals not only those of NGO heads but also of most elected political leaders. Recent examples of human rights-related NGOs whose campaigns have received substantially higher levels of coverage following celebrity endorsement include the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Amnesty International, and Drop the Debt. Using both quantitative and qualitative content analysis of media coverage and public opinion regarding of these and other NGO campaigns over the last ten years, I examine the effectiveness of celebrity endorsement as a tool that NGOs can wield in their battles for influence over public opinion and elected officials. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]