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Competing Concerns: Balancing Human Rights and National Security in US Economic Aid Allocation

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Abstract

This paper theorizes that the effect of human rights violations on US economic aid is conditioned by the salience of US national security concerns. National security concerns will be more salient in situations where recipients contribute to maintaining US security and in temporal eras when the USA is perceived as being under increased external threat. As the relational and temporal salience of national security increases, any negative effect of human rights violations on US economic aid should decrease. I test this hypothesis by examining US economic aid allocations to states from 1977 to 2005. The results show that the salience of national security concerns present in the US-recipient relationship does condition the relationship between human rights violations and US economic aid. There are also significant differences between different temporal eras of US foreign aid allocation. Future work should address how conflicts between interests and values in US foreign policy are negotiated.

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Notes

  1. There are indications that policymakers continue to believe that the protection of human rights by the USA can increase soft power and allow the USA to achieve foreign policy goals with greater ease. In his 2009 inaugural address, President Obama spoke of the power that grows through “the force of our example,” while his Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, advocated strengthening the State Department in order to increase soft power through diplomacy. Even the Bush Administration, with Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State, advocated tactics more closely associated with soft power. Thus, even the most hawkish of administrations understands that there is at least some value to this notion.

  2. Nye (2004) provides a number of instances in which American soft power led to states being attracted to the US. Most notably, a number of former Eastern-bloc countries seem to be particularly attracted to the USA due to its position and international image.

  3. These improvements include cutting funds for traditional Latin American client states like Argentina and Brazil. The improvements even extended into the Reagan Administration. President Reagan was unable to block a Congressional bill that imposed sanctions on the apartheid South African regime and sponsored the Nicaraguan “contras” illegally after Congress voted to cut funds for the anti-Sandinista rebels in October of 1992 and1994. Mertus (2004) mentions that post-Cold War presidents had to deal with a Congress and State Department that were increasingly concerned with human rights but also claims that human rights were especially valued when “there was no conflict of interest” (Mertus, 35).

  4. Much of this later literature incorporated the suggestions of Poe (1990) and relied on multivariate models with better measures for both US national security and human rights violations.

  5. Human rights violations are measured using the Political Terror Scale (Gibney et al. 2013). Internal conflict is measured using the ordinal measure provided by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (Uppsala Conflict Data 2013). Greater detail on the coding of these variables is provided in the “Data and Methods” section below.

  6. There is no perfect way of measuring the degree to which a state contributes to US national security. Additionally, UN Voting Affinity has been shown to be determined by US foreign aid (Dreher et al. 2008; Wang 1999). However, demonstrating that the same results occur regardless of the measure used demonstrates that the results are not measure-dependent.

  7. For more on the coding process, see Wood and Gibney (2010). Poe et al. (2001) explore the differences between the Amnesty International and State Department PTS scores at length. It should also be noted that PTS focuses extensively on personal integrity rights (torture, imprisonment, etc.) instead of other rights, such as civil and political rights.

  8. Given that Formal Ally is a dichotomous variable and that roughly 75 % of the countries in the dataset are not formal allies of the USA, there may be significant variation in nonallies that is not captured by this dichotomous variable. Therefore, it would not be surprising if the effect of Human Rights Violations was insignificant with respect to nonallies.

  9. Data missing from the UN measure is filled in with the World Bank estimates. Data missing from both is supplemented by Gleditsch (2002).

  10. For summary statistics, please consult Table 7 (Online Resource 1).

  11. Another in way in which to mitigate problems of heteroskedasticity is to use a random effects Tobit model. This model produces results that are substantively the same with the exception of a loss in significance of some of the interactions conducted with the State Department version of the PTS. See results in Tables 8, 9, and 10 in Online Resource 1. For fixed effects results, see Tables 11, 12, and 13 in Online Resource 1. The lagged dependent variable is excluded from the hierarchical models due to its tendency to produce bias in such models, especially when the temporal dimension is lower than the units of analysis (as it is in this case) (Bhargava and Sargan 1983).

  12. The results of the interactions using the Cingranelli-Richards Rights Index (CIRI) (2014) are substantively the same. See Table 14 in Online Resource 1.

  13. For the sake of space, I produce the graphs of the interactions in Stata using only the Amnesty International PTS. The results are substantively the same when using the State Department PTS.

  14. For the sake of simplicity, only the Amnesty International PTS scale is used in Table 4. The results are substantively the same when using the State Department PTS. To calculate percentages, the Tobit coefficients are multiplied by 100. All other variables are held at their means. “Low” Tau-B = −0.586, “Average” Tau-B 0.093, “High” and Tau-B = 0.774. “Low” UN Voting Affinity = −1, “Average” UN Voting Affinity = −0.356, and “High” UN Voting Affinity = 0.503.

  15. The predicted aid amounts were calculated with the model using UN Voting Affinity as the measure of US national security importance.

  16. Once again, I produce the graphs of the interactions using only the Amnesty International PTS. The results are substantively the same when using the State Department PTS.

  17. Most formal alliances the US maintains are in Europe.

  18. Extending the dataset necessitates replacing the UCDP-PRIO measurements for Interstate Conflict and Intrastate Conflict, as these measures only go to 2005. Replacing the UCDP-PRIO measurements and inserting Marshall’s (2016) measures of International Violence and Civil Violence expands the dataset significantly into the post-9/11 period (to 2011). However, observations of some models remain small (the Tau-B measure still only goes to 2005). Running the post-9/11 model with Marshall’s (2016) shows insignificant interactions for Formal Ally and Tau-B (the latter is likely due to a lack of data). The interactions between UN Voting Affinity and Human Rights Violations are significant and in the expected direction. Furthermore, the coefficient for Human Rights Violations never becomes negative, even at the lowest values of UN Voting Affinity, meaning that in the post-9/11 period, human rights violations either have no effect on a state’s aid or result in an increase in US economic aid. In the post-9/11 era, human rights violations never result in a decrease in US aid. For the results of these interactions by era, see Table 16 in Online Resource 1.

  19. In order to address the possibility of reverse causality, I have run several alternative models. Running the models with a 2-year time lag for Human Rights Violations produces the same results. For the results, see Table 17 in Online Resource 1. Running a two-stage-least-squares regression instrumenting Marshall’s (2016) measures of internal discord for the Human Rights Violations constituent term and interaction term does not substantively change the results. For these results, see Table 20 in Online Resource 1.

  20. Including an interaction between Democracy and Human Rights Violations does not render the interaction between the state’s importance to US national security and Human Rights Violations insignificant. For these results, see Table 19 in Online Resource 1.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Gabriella Montinola, Daniel Yuch Kono, Miroslav Nincic, Zeev Maoz, and three anonymous reviewers for their guidance and comments. The author would also like to acknowledge Paul Musgrave, Cristian Cantir, Clayton Webb, Robert Jefferson Dillard, and Taylor McMichael for their helpful feedback on a previous draft of this paper, presented at the Midwestern Political Science Association Conference in Chicago, IL, on April 18, 2015.

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  1. Department of Political Science, University of California, Davis, USA

    Evan W. Sandlin

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Correspondence to Evan W. Sandlin.

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Sandlin, E.W. Competing Concerns: Balancing Human Rights and National Security in US Economic Aid Allocation. Hum Rights Rev 17, 439–462 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-016-0426-2

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