Does social spending add substance to formal rights?

Abstract

This article examines the effects of social spending on political participation and various forms of collective action conditioned on a state's level of respect for empowerment rights. It brings the language of rights to the more well-developed comparative study of voter turnout. I theorize that a state which spends more on social initiatives drives down economic and social barriers between individuals and the polls or participating in collective action. This increases the substantive use of rights guaranteed formally by the state. I find that spending helps most where rights are already respected. I also find that spending can negatively impact participatory democracy where these rights are less well established. Ultimately, I conclude that institutional strength has a greater effect on the substantive use of rights than social spending.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to acknowledge Amanda Murdie, Laron Williams, A. Cooper Drury, Dursun Peksen, Shareen Hertel, and Ben Carbonetti for their insights. Previous versions of this article were presented at the International Studies Association's Mid-West conference (St. Louis, November, 2013) and the International Studies Association's annual conference (Toronto, March, 2014).

Notes on contributor

Zack Bowersox is a doctoral candidate in international relations at the University of Missouri.

Notes

1. All statistical models and tests performed using STATA 13 (StataCorp 2011).

2. This will include authoritarian states where popular elections are perhaps forbidden and states with compulsory voting. In each case, variance exists across observations and no compulsory state ever nears 100% turn-out.

3. The observations for human rights INGOs falls below 200 for the event count, OECD models. I have not imputed this nor the ongoing conflict data as these are country-year counts not indices or ratios that would inherently be normalized unlike event counts.