Structural Adjustment Programs and Human Rights:The Counterintuitive Effect of Democracy
Year: 2011
Type: preprint
Abstract: Recent empirical research has found that the World Bank’s structural adjustment programs (SAPs) increase human rights violations in countries that implement structural adjustment. However, it remains unclear what type of regimes are more likely to violate human rights when they implement SAPs. This article presents a counterintuitive argument that suggests that human rights violations that result form SAPs are more likely among democracies than autocracies. While the authority characteristics of autocracies discourage public protest and thereby reduce the opportunity for repression when SAPs are implemented, the institutional openness of democratic governments encourages public protest against SAPs and, therefore, increases the opportunity for state repression. This research employs a Bivariate Probit selection model to estimate the interactive effect of regime type and the implementation of SAPs on human rights violations for a sample of 164 countries from 1980-2002. The findings support the argument that human rights violations increase in countries when democratic governments implement SAPs.
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
Authors: Horace A. Bartilow, Yanyu Ke
Institution: University of Kentucky
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1575131212