Institutionalized autocracies, policy interdependence, and labor rights

ABSTRACT

This article examines how varieties of autocracies cope with the downward international policy interdependence in labor rights. It argues that institutionalized autocracies are more resistant to this downward pressure. Workers are empowered to elicit more policy concessions in institutionalized autocracies with parties and legislatures than in noninstitutionalized autocracies in which such institutions are absent. Parties and legislatures allow workers to organize and negotiate with states regarding their rights in a regularized and peaceful manner, thereby preventing complete collusion between states and firms. Heterogeneity in autocracies' responses to downward policy pressure is thus expected. Using a conditional spatial econometric technique, this article analyzes a newly collected dataset on labor rights for the period 1994–2009 for all autocracies. The empirical results offer support to the proposed theory. The findings also show that this institutionalization only matters for labor rights laws but not for labor rights practices.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank David Cingranelli and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and comments.

Notes on contributor

Zhiyuan Wang is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Binghamton University, SUNY. His research interests are international and comparative political economy, human rights (including labor rights), international institutions, and law and politics in China. His work has appeared in China: An International Journal and Human Rights Review.

Notes

1. I thank one reviewer for suggesting this discussion.

2. For a literature review, please see Berliner et al. (2015).

3. Greenhill et al. (2009) and Mosley (2011) derive values of law and practice from the original data, which have no such distinction in the coding scheme (Mosley and Uno 2007). However, both laws and practices used in Greenhill et al.'s paper are somehow negatively correlated with the original labor rights scores.

4. For technical details, please see Sailer (1978).

5. There is an alternative data set (Hadenius and Teorell's data on autocratic regimes) which has a slightly difference focus — the number of political parties. It is claimed to contain more autocratic country-years than Geddes et al.'s (2014) dataset, and the difference is substantial (Wahman et al. 2013). I therefore redo all the analyses with Hadenius and Teorell's data. The results largely remain the same. The results are available upon request.

6. I thank one reviewer for making this methodological suggestion.

7. In an additional test not presented here, I rule out those country-years using the variable lparty in Cheibub et al.'s (2010) data by dropping all observations when lparty equals 0, which denotes that there is either no party or no legislature. The results remain largely unaltered.

8. Note that the expression here is slightly different from the original one proposed by Neumayer and Plümper (2012). This is because the weighting matrices are already row-standardized.