Accountability and Human Rights: A Principal-Agent Model

• In Event: States as Protectors and Violators of Human Rights

Abstract

We assume that citizens, politicians, and human rights-relevant bureaucrats such as police, soldiers, and prison guards are all rational actors seeking to maximize their self-interests. For them, the costs of protecting human rights usually exceed the benefits. Politicians seek power, wealth or both. They see protection of many human rights such as free speech, freedom of assembly and association, and prohibitions of using torture as tools that citizens can use to make their work harder and to make their tenure in office shorter and less secure. Citizens, on the other hand, want politicians and their agents to devote their energy and talents to producing many high quality public goods including full or nearly full protection for all of their internationally recognized human rights. The production of human rights, therefore, can be seen as a classic principal agent problem. Even if citizen demands for human rights protection are very strong, there will be inevitable agency loss between citizens and their politicians and between politicians and those to whom the tasks of human rights protection are delegated.
The model we develop for analyzing this problem is a particular type of principal-agent model-- a delegated chain of authority. Citizens make demands on politicians, who make policies. Politicians then delegate responsibility for implementation of their policies to bureaucrats. Politicians, soldiers, police, prison guards only will be willing to devote their efforts to producing high levels of protection of human rights if the benefits they receive exceed the costs. Institutional and non-institutional factors that affect the incentives of politicians by making them more accountable to citizen preferences will also cause politicians to produce laws and other policies that provide strong protection for human rights.
It is not a simple, single-stage principal-agent problem, because the policies that politicians produce such as laws, executive orders, new constitutions, and constitutional amendments are not self-enforcing. The language of those policies simply reveals what politicians say they want to achieve. Politicians rarely violate human rights themselves. The civilian and military bureaucratic agents of the state in their interactions with citizens decide whether to violate human rights or to respect them. Politicians are able to translate their good public policies into good public outputs only if they are willing to monitor the implementation of their policies, and only if they command a state that is capable of executing the orders they issue. Since there often are significant monitoring costs, even if the other enabling conditions are in place, policies may not be faithfully implemented.
Various forms of principal agent models, including this one, have been widely used in the fields of comparative politics and political economy and to a much more limited extent, in the human rights subfield. Early applications of principal-agent analysis to explain human rights outcomes have yielded promising results, leading us to believe that additional insights are possible. Classic principal agent problems leading to extra agency losses such as multiple principals and multiple tasks may help us understand why some governments produce strong protections of human rights while others do not and why governments protect some human rights but not others.
A delegated chain of authority is an appropriate theoretical framework for guiding human rights research, because it highlights factors likely to make politicians more willing to protect the human rights of their citizens. More importantly it also highlights the factors at the second stage that make it more or less likely that the human rights policies politicians produce will be executed by those who are delegated the authority for doing so. This second link in the delegated chain is crucially important but has been relatively neglected in previous research.

Authors

• David L. Cingranelli, Binghamton University, SUNY

• Mikhail G. Filippov, SUNY, Binghamton