Human Rights

Commerce and Imagination: The Sources of Concern about International Human Rights

in the US Congress

Ellen A. Cutrone and Benjamin O. Fordham

Binghamton University

Do members of Congress put human rights concerns on the agenda in response to their constituents’ demands for trade protection? Humani- tarian concern may be an important motive, but the normative weight of these issues also makes them a potentially powerful tool for politi- cians with less elevated agendas. They may criticize the behavior of countries with whom their constituents must compete economically, while overlooking the actions of countries with which their constituents have more harmonious economic relations. This paper tests several hypotheses about the salience of human rights concerns in the politics of US foreign policy using data on congressional speeches during the late 1990s gathered from the Congressional Record. We find evidence that, while humanitarian interests remain an important motive for raising human rights issues, the economic interests of their constituents influ- ence which members of Congress speak out on these questions, and the countries on which they focus their concern.

[I]f one has ideas, one cannot carry them out without wealth at one’s back. I have tried to combine the commercial with the imaginative, and up to the present I have not failed.

Cecil Rhodes (1900:319–320)

It may safely be asserted that, wherever ‘‘the commercial’’ is combined with ‘‘the imaginative’’ in any shape or sort, the latter is exploited by the former.

J. A. Hobson (1965 [1902]:202)

In many respects these issues of most-favored nation trade status with China and NAFTA are connected. They are both about extending trading rights. They are both about wages. They are both about jobs. They are both about human rights.

Rep. David Bonior (D-MI), June 1997

Upon returning from an April 2008 meeting with the Dalai Lama in India, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), called on President Bush to consider boycotting the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympic Games to protest Chinese repression in Tibet and its poor overall record on human rights (Hulse 2008). Stung by protests during the progress of

Authors’ notes: An earlier version of this paper was presented to the 2007 annual meeting of the Peace Science Society (International). The authors would like to thank participants at that meeting and at the world politics work- shop at Binghamton University for their comments and suggestions. Any remaining errors are our responsibility. The data used in this article are available from the authors or from the ISQ data archive.

doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2478.2010.00603.x � 2010 International Studies Association

International Studies Quarterly (2010) 54, 633–655

the Olympic torch, the official Chinese news agency accused Pelosi of maintain- ing a double standard that denounced China while overlooking American human rights violations in Iraq. It further insinuated that her comments were motivated by anxiety about the growing Chinese economy and anachronistic Cold War hostility toward the country (Liang 2008).

American criticism of human rights conditions in other countries and counter- charges questioning American motives are nothing new. As the first two above quoted comments on the motives of another world power a century ago suggest, concern about the use of noble sentiments to mask self-interested goals is not confined to American foreign policy. Human rights have enormous normative weight. Charges that other governments are infringing on them have had signifi- cant policy consequences including the imposition of sweeping trade sanctions. Human rights provisions are now often included in preferential trade agree- ments (Hafner-Burton 2005). The increasingly close relationship between trade and human rights raises some important questions. When do American elites make respect for human rights in other countries a public issue? Do demands for trade protection influence political leaders’ decisions to raise this issue? Asked another way, when it comes to human rights in American foreign policy, does the commercial exploit the imaginative?

These questions concern the agenda-setting activities of political actors. Poe, Carey, and Vazquez (2001) found evidence of political and economic biases in State Department human rights reporting. Our focus is on similar biases among individual members of Congress. Explanations for individual efforts to influence the public agenda do not necessarily account for policy outcomes. These efforts to set the agenda are nevertheless a critically important element of the policy- making process. A first step in specifying the link between societal preferences and foreign policy outcomes is to identify the scope of the political debate through which these outcomes are determined. Some issues are selected for dis- cussion while others are downplayed or not discussed at all. What policymakers pay attention to in the first place is arguably just as important as which interests or preferences win battles over specific legislation or policy initiatives. Moreover, even when congressional criticism of their human rights record is not translated into policy, the criticized states still react to it, as the Chinese government did when Speaker Pelosi called on the president to boycott the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. Agenda-setting efforts like those considered here can affect American foreign relations even when they do not produce policy change.

In order to test explanations for these agenda setting efforts, we will use data gathered from the Congressional Record on speeches about human rights during the late 1990s. Congress is a visible forum. Issues raised there can force political actors, including the executive, other members of Congress, as well as other states, to react. Members’ decisions to focus on international human rights reveal something about their priorities and offer a useful window onto their efforts to shape the agenda. Unlike roll-call votes, which permit only an up-or-down response on a limited range of issues, members can raise nearly any issue they choose in their remarks on the floor and can explain their positions in some detail. Their explanations are especially helpful in cases where a range of sanc- tions are under consideration. It is often clear from floor remarks that a member supports a limited sanction only in order to avoid more serious action when their voting record simply indicates that they supported the proposed action.

Claims that economic interests motivate efforts to put human rights on the agenda imply a variety of hypotheses about the members of Congress most likely to raise these issues and the countries most likely to be targeted for criticism. Our evidence suggests that, though they are by no means the only thing that matters, constituent economic interests strongly influence when human rights issues appear on the American foreign policy agenda. Members from

634 Commerce and Imagination

import-sensitive districts are more likely to speak out about human rights viola- tions. Members from export-oriented districts are less likely to do so. In the case of China, we find evidence that members target human rights violators with whom their constituents compete. Overall, the commercial appears to exploit the imaginative to some extent, as Hobson said it would.

The remainder of this paper proceeds in four sections. The first explains how economic interests might influence efforts to put human rights on the American foreign policy agenda and considers two alternative sources of explanation: humanitarian concerns and the international political interests of the United States. It draws testable hypotheses from each line of argument about the mem- bers of Congress most likely to raise these concerns, and the countries most likely to be targeted. The second section provides details about the data we will use to test these hypotheses. The third section presents the results of our empiri- cal analysis. A final section summarizes and concludes.

Explaining the Salience of Human Rights

The comments of those who raise human rights concerns and the responses of those they criticize suggest several sources of explanation for the emergence of these issues in the politics of American foreign policy. Our principal concern is with the influence of constituent trade interests, but it makes sense to weigh this consideration against other influences on the salience of human rights concerns. In addition to trade, we will consider the role of humanitarian concerns and American political interests. These motives are not mutually exclusive, but they are not always complementary and have very different normative implications. Their relative importance is an important empirical question.

Economic Interests

Americans who are threatened by imports from other countries may use human rights concerns to justify calls for trade protection. While our argument is about agenda setting, not policy outcomes, it is important to note that placing human rights concerns on the table can, and often does, lead to concrete actions. Human rights issues resonate with the American public and have sometimes jus- tified economic sanctions. The Jackson-Vanik amendment’s denial of most- favored nation trade status to communist countries that restricted emigration, and the broad sanctions imposed on the apartheid regime in South Africa, are two especially well known examples, but there are others. Export and foreign aid restrictions were imposed on China in response to the Tiananmen Square Massa- cre and to the country’s coercive family-planning programs. Cuban repression of the political opposition justified the imposition of comprehensive economic sanctions. The Helms-Burton Act bolstered these sanctions in 1996, during the time period of our study (1995–1998). Also during the years of our study, human rights violations led to sweeping trade sanctions on Sudan in 1997. While the United States has had economic sanctions in place against Myanmar since 1988, repression of the democratic opposition led to new sanctions in 1997 (Congres- sional Quarterly Almanac 1998:16–20–16–21).

The annual debate in the 1990s over the extension of most-favored nation (MFN) trading status to China illustrates the linkage between human rights and trade sanctions. Even after President Clinton officially delinked the issues in 1994, members of Congress continued to criticize China’s human rights records, arguing against granting MFN. China was never denied MFN status but a coali- tion of ‘‘religious groups, conservatives, human rights activists, and labor unions’’ consistently and fiercely opposed its extension (Congressional Quarterly Almanac 1997:8–37). Those opposed to MFN commonly framed the debate as a

635Ellen A. Cutrone and Benjamin O. Fordham

contest of the principles of human rights and freedom against profits. Many went one step further and claimed that the United States was not only sacrificing human rights but also was losing out in the trading relationship itself. As Nancy Pelosi put it in the 1997 debate, ‘‘it is time to stop holding our policy hostage to the profits of a few exporting elites at the expense of most products made in America’’ (Congressional Quarterly Almanac 1997:8–37).

Human rights issues can provide potent talking points for protectionist mem- bers of Congress. Putting human rights concerns on the agenda is a rhetorically useful way to frame restrictions on international trade because it appeals to uni- versally held values rather than selfish economic interests. To the extent that human rights issues are actually used in this way, members of Congress from import-sensitive districts should be more likely to raise these concerns. Con- versely, members of Congress whose constituents depend on exports should be more reluctant to do so.

Assessing the influence of trade on human rights concerns is complicated by the fact that it produces income gains for some and losses for others. Identifying these winners and losers has been the subject of substantial research. Two major lines of argument have somewhat different empirical implications. The well known Stolper-Samuelson theorem suggests that owners of locally scarce factors will see their incomes fall under free trade, while owners of locally abundant fac- tors will gain (Stolper and Samuelson 1941). Factor ownership should thus explain political divisions over trade policy. Rogowski (1989) used this approach to explain patterns of political conflict in a variety of countries. The major alter- native way of explaining the politics of trade focuses on divisions between indus- tries rather than factor ownership. Stolper-Samuelson assumes that factors are mobile across industrial sectors. If this assumption does not hold, and factors are thus sector-specific, then political differences over trade should form along sectoral lines, uniting the holders of different factors within the same industry. Previous research on the politics of trade has found support for both the Stolper-Samuelson and specific-factors arguments (for example, Hiscox 2001, 2002; Scheve and Slaughter 2001; Fordham and McKeown 2003).

These two lines of argument about the winners and losers from trade suggest two sets of hypotheses about their constituents’ trade interests and the deci- sions of members of Congress to raise human rights issues. The first follows from the Stolper-Samuelson argument. To the extent that factor ownership is the driving force behind the demand for trade protection, members from rela- tively poor and less-educated districts should be more likely to raise these issues. In a capital-abundant country like the United States, poorer and less educated individuals should see their income fall as trade grows. These individ- uals are more likely to be influential if they are organized, so we will also con- sider the effect of union density within the district. The second set of hypotheses follows from the specific-factors argument. If the politics of trade are driven by sectoral cleavages rather than factor ownership, then members of Congress from districts with more import-competing industries should raise human rights issues more often. Those from export-oriented districts should be more reluctant to do so.

Just as there is more than one theoretical argument about how to identify the winners and losers from trade, there is more than one way in which these inter- ests might influence members of Congress. The first and most straightforward possibility is that members raise human rights as a conscious political strategy to protect the interests of their constituents. If so, they should then focus their con- cerns on the specific countries that compete economically with their constituents and refrain from criticizing countries that provide their constituents with impor- tant markets. There is little to be gained from altering their behavior with respect to economically irrelevant countries. This conscious use of humanitarian

636 Commerce and Imagination

arguments for economic purposes is probably what Hobson had in mind when he claimed that ‘‘the commercial’’ would always exploit ‘‘the imaginative.’’ To the extent that such a strategy leads members to pay attention to human rights issues only when they can serve their constituents’ economic interests by doing so, Hobson’s cynicism is justified.

Members need not pursue a conscious political strategy of targeting compet- ing countries in order for economic interests to influence their priorities. A selection process might produce a similar relationship. Members who are ideo- logically committed to promoting international human rights might simply be more likely to find a sympathetic audience, and thus to be elected and reelected, when raising human rights concerns carries some material benefit for their constituents. Conversely, members who raise these potentially trade- inhibiting issues may draw more opposition in export-oriented districts. This selection process could produce the appearance of the opportunistic use of human rights rhetoric without any cynical calculations of economic interest by members of Congress.

In most respects, a member whose attitude toward international human rights stemmed from such a selection process would be difficult to distinguish from one who was self-consciously using the issue to advance his or her constituents’ interests. One likely difference between these two patterns is that those who are pursuing a conscious political strategy are more likely to target countries whose exporters compete with their constituents rather than simply to raise human rights issues across the board. Unfortunately, the detailed data on production or employment in each congressional district necessary to test this hypothesis across all potential targets of congressional human rights criticism are not available. Many countries’ exports to the United States compete with only a relatively nar- row set of domestic industries not adequately described by the broad sectoral cat- egories available in district-level employment data. In the analysis that follows, we will offer a more limited test of the hypothesis that members target specific countries based on constituent economic interests by examining criticism of China. Because the volume of Chinese imports is large in many industries, an observable relationship between these imports and the wide categories on which we have employment data is plausible. Evidence that sensitivity to Chinese imports predicts member criticism of Chinese human rights performance better than overall import sensitivity would support the political strategy argument over the selection hypothesis.

Although the availability of data limits our analysis of whether members spe- cifically target countries that compete economically with their constituents, we will test several constituent economic interest hypotheses about the countries most likely to be targeted for aggregate congressional criticism of their human rights performance. To the extent that a country provides a market for Ameri- can exports, more members who might otherwise speak out about their human rights performance will be reluctant to do so, resulting in fewer speeches overall. To the extent that a country exports goods and services to the United States that compete with domestic producers, more members of Congress should criticize the country’s human rights record. We will also test a closely related claim concerning foreign direct investment. The more Ameri- can foreign direct investment a country receives, the more members of Con- gress should refrain from criticizing its human rights record, for fear of undermining the economic relationship. Because they concern the characteris- tics of trade with specific countries, these hypotheses are most consistent with the argument that members raise human rights concerns as part of a con- scious strategy to protect their constituents’ interests rather than simply because some districts select members who are ideologically committed to international human rights.

637Ellen A. Cutrone and Benjamin O. Fordham

Humanitarian Concerns

Obviously, economic interests are not the only way of explaining the emergence of human rights issues in the politics of American foreign policy. Perhaps the simplest explanation is that the actual human rights practices of countries and the desire of members of Congress to highlight these practices drive efforts to put human rights in other countries on the agenda. Non-governmental organiza- tions like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International devote considerable effort to bringing human rights violations to light. Ramos, Ron, and Thoms (2007) found that these organizations had some success influencing media cov- erage of these events, especially in places that receive relatively little attention from the media in developed countries. If humanitarian concerns shape efforts to put human rights on the agenda, then American leaders should respond to actual conditions and to the efforts of human rights organizations to bring these conditions to their attention. They might also focus their efforts on recipients of American aid over whom they should have more leverage. Overall, to the extent that humanitarian concerns predominate, congressional rhetoric about human rights conditions in particular countries should roughly correspond to the extent of human rights violations in those countries.

Because international human rights conditions do not vary across members of Congress as their constituents’ interests do, the implications of humanitarian concerns for the activity of individual members are not as strong as those of eco- nomic interests. However, some characteristics of individual members or their districts may influence the salience of humanitarian concerns. Ideologically lib- eral members might be more interested in human rights (McCormick and Mitch- ell 2007). Previous research on congressional voting has found that conservatives are more concerned about national security interests (for example, Bernstein and Anthony 1974; Wayman 1985; Lindsay 1991). Human rights considerations sometimes conflict with national security concerns, something that led some con- servative policymakers to argue explicitly against their relevance to American for- eign policy during the Cold War (Kirkpatrick 1979; Donnelly 1989:237–41). If this position persisted after the Cold War, then conservatives might be more reluctant to raise these issues than are liberals.

Districts with greater concentrations of people who think events beyond the borders of the United States are important should be more likely to elect mem- bers of Congress who are concerned about international human rights. Indicators of knowledge about the world beyond the United States may capture this effect. The proportion of the district’s population born outside the United States is one such indicator. Immigrant groups may urge their representatives to pay attention to conditions in their native country. The Cuban-American community in South Florida is an especially visible example of this phenomenon, but it is not unique.

Education and income may also indicate cosmopolitanism. More educated indi- viduals are more likely to be aware of conditions beyond the borders of the Uni- ted States. Similarly, individuals with higher incomes have more opportunities for both education and foreign travel. Both wealthier and better educated individuals tend to hold more internationalist views on foreign policy issues (Fordham 2008). For these reasons, members of Congress from wealthier and better educated dis- tricts may be more likely to raise international human rights issues. These hypoth- eses concerning education and income directly contradict those derived from trade interests. They thus offer an especially good test of the relative strength of economic interests and humanitarian concerns. To the extent that these contra- dictory implications of constituent education and income cancel each other out, we are not likely to reject the null hypothesis concerning these variables.

The argument that humanitarian concern is the principal motive for raising human rights issues has stronger implications about the aggregate number of

638 Commerce and Imagination

speeches directed at each country. Actual human rights conditions in the world do not vary over individual members of Congress. Except for the differences based on ideology and cosmopolitanism just noted, actual conditions should exert similar pressures on each member. Even if these pressures do not pro- duce large differences among members of Congress, they should still produce substantial differences in the most frequent targets of aggregate criticism, as more members target countries with poor human rights records. News coverage of these human rights abuses and attention from human rights organizations might also increase aggregate congressional attention. We will test these hypotheses using the aggregate number of speeches directed at each potential target state.

International Political Interests

A third explanation for the salience of human rights concerns focuses on Ameri- can international political interests. It is possible that human rights violations become politically important when countries that have hostile political relations with the United States commit them, and are downplayed when the perpetrators are friendly or strategically important. During the Cold War, some observers argued that hawkish American leaders used human rights concerns to block efforts to improve relations with the Soviet Union and other communist coun- tries while ignoring similar actions by American allies. For example, support for the Jackson-Vanik amendment may have been motivated as much by general hos- tility to the Soviet Union as by specific concerns about Soviet restrictions on Jew- ish emigration. If this line of argument is correct, then concerns about human rights in particular countries should be related to other indicators of the state of US relations with those countries.

Because American alliances, rivalries, and other international political con- cerns do not vary over individual members of Congress, this line of argument does not have strong implications about individual decisions to raise human rights concerns. Conservatives’ greater concern about national security issues, noted earlier as a reason they might be less likely to raise human rights issues for humanitarian reasons, are one way in which the influence of international political considerations might appear at the level of the individual member of Congress. To the extent that they prioritize national security concerns, conserva- tives should be less likely to criticize American allies and more likely to criticize countries with which the United States has poor political relations. These hypotheses can be empirically tested alongside claims about the influence of eco- nomic interests and humanitarian concerns.

The influence of international political concerns should be more apparent in the aggregate number of speeches directed at each potential target of human rights criticism. Apart from differences based on ideology, which may not be overwhelming in practice, international political conditions exert the same influ- ence on each member of Congress. To the extent that political considerations matter, American allies should receive less criticism, and American rivals more criticism, than other countries.

Table 1 summarizes the hypotheses implied by the three lines of argument we have outlined in this section, as well as the variables we will use to test them. The next section provides more information about the way we will test these hypotheses.

Research Design

We will test the hypotheses set out in the last section using data on congressional speeches gathered from the Congressional Record, as well as data on members of

639Ellen A. Cutrone and Benjamin O. Fordham

Congress and their constituents, and on international conditions. This section will explain how we gathered these data, focusing primarily on the speech data, which were collected for this project.

TABLE 1. Hypotheses Concerning Congressional Human Rights Speeches

Variable used for test Expected sign

Economic interest hypotheses Members representing import-competing districts should raise human rights issues more often

Import sensitivity index +

Members representing export-oriented districts should raise human rights issues less often

Export orientation index )

Members representing more educated districts should raise human right issues less often

Percent of district with at least some college

)

Members representing higher-income districts should raise human rights issues less often

Median family income in district

)

Members should criticize countries whose exports compete with their constituents more often

China-specific import sensitivity index

+

Members should criticize countries that provide markets for their constituents’ exports less often

China-specific export orientation index

)

Human rights violators who compete with American producers in the US market should be criticized more often

Log of target exports to United States, weighted by US employment in sector

+

Human rights violators who provide markets for American exports should be criticized less often

Log of US exports to target

)

Human rights violators who receive more American foreign direct investment should be criticized less often

Log of US foreign direct investment in target

)

Humanitarian concern hypotheses Liberal members should raise human rights issues more often

First dimension of DW- NOMINATE score

)

Members representing more educated districts should raise human right issues more often

Percent of district with at least some college

+

Members representing higher-income districts should raise human rights issues more often

Median family income in district

+

Members representing districts with large immigrant populations should raise human rights issues more often

Percent of district population foreign born

+

Countries with worse human rights records should be criticized more often

CIRI physical integrity rights index

)

Human rights violators with larger populations should be criticized more often

Log of target population +

Human rights violators who receive American foreign aid should be criticized more often

Value of US economic and military aid

+

Human rights violators whose actions receive more attention from the media or NGOs should be criticized more often

Amnesty International news releases; index of media coverage

+

American political interest hypotheses Conservatives should raise human rights issues concerning American allies less often

First dimension of DW- NOMINATE score

)

Conservatives should raise human rights issues concerning American rivals more often

First dimension of DW- NOMINATE score

+

American allies should be criticized less often COW defense pacts ) Recipients of American foreign aid should be criticized less often

Value of US economic and military aid

)

640 Commerce and Imagination

Congressional Speeches on Human Rights

Data on congressional speeches have several advantages for testing hypotheses about issue salience and agenda setting. Votes often have more immediate policy consequences, but the issues on which they take place are selected by the con- gressional leadership, and members often feel pressure to support their party leadership in spite of their actual preferences. By contrast, members may give speeches on nearly any topic they choose. Because their party’s interests are not immediately at stake, the speeches should more closely reflect individual mem- bers’ priorities. These speeches thus provide a way of testing hypotheses about the considerations that influence these priorities.

Our data-gathering effort focused on evaluations of the human rights perfor- mance of other countries by members of Congress in the 104th and 105th Con- gresses (1995–1998). Because our principal concern was with the relative influence of economic and humanitarian concerns, we decided to gather data during a period when security issues were less important. We will return to the implications of this decision below when we assess our results concerning Ameri- can political interests. We began with all statements in the Congressional Record that included the phrase ‘‘human rights.’’ Obviously, not all speeches about human rights use the phrase, but a substantial sample of them will. In order to qualify for inclusion in our data the statement had to meet the following criteria:

1. The statement could be attributed to a specific member of Congress. Uses of the phrase ‘‘human rights’’ in the agendas of congressional committees or the texts of proposed legislation read into the record by the Clerk of the House or Senate thus did not qualify. We attribute statements made in newspaper editorials, reports, and other material introduced into the Record to the member who inserted them. State- ments by non-voting delegates, such as the individual representing the District of Columbia, were included, though they are not used in the analysis of individual member speech activity that follows because we lack comparable data on their constituents.

2. The statement either commented on human rights conditions in another country, or proposed action against another country because of human rights conditions. Generalized references to human rights that were not targeted at any specific country were not included. For example, statements praising the human rights activism of a particular individual were not included unless those statements were linked to a particular country. Similarly, uses of the phrase ‘‘human rights’’ in the context of a ‘‘human-rights official’’ or ‘‘the United Nations Human Rights Commission’’ were often not part of a comment on human rights conditions in a particular country.

3. The statement pertained to current conditions in the target country. Statements commemorating historical events, such as the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide, were not included unless they were used to comment on current conditions.

4. The statement about the target country was at least two sentences long. The two sentences had to be either consecutive or occur within the same paragraph. This criterion is intended to exclude instances in which a country is mentioned only briefly as an example, or as part of a list of countries that engage in a certain practice. A speaker could target more than one country in a single speech, but he or she had to comment on conditions in that country in a cluster of at least two sentences in order to qualify for inclusion in the data set.

641Ellen A. Cutrone and Benjamin O. Fordham

Our data include some instances where a member gave several speeches about the same country on a single day. These speeches often occurred in the course of floor debates, with the remarks separated by questions from other members of Congress, the reading of the text of legislation, and the like. In other instances, a speech appears in the record in the form it was given on the floor, then again after it was revised and extended by the member. In order to avoid double-counting these remarks, we treated all statements made on the same day about a single target as one speech. Applying these criteria, we found 2,778 country evaluations given on the floor of the Senate and House of Representa- tives between 1995 and 1998. Table 2 provides some basic information about the data. A majority of those who served in Congress during this period gave such a speech, with 289 of 534 House members and 93 of 118 senators contributing during this period. Some members were much more active than others, however.

TABLE 2. Most Frequent Congressional Human Rights Speakers and Targets, 1995–1998

Human rights speeches by most active members of Congress

Representative Speeches Senator Speeches

Christopher H. Smith R-NJ 131 Russell D. Feingold D-WI 50 Benjamin A. Gilman R-NY 88 Patrick Leahy D-VT 50 Tom Lantos D-CA 69 Jesse Helms R-NC 32 Frank R. Wolf R-VA 56 Alfonse M. D’Amato R-NY 29 Lee H. Hamilton D-IN 52 Tim Hutchinson R-AR 28 John Edward Porter R-IL 48 Paul Simon D-IL 26 Nancy Pelosi D-CA 46 Paul Wellstone D-MN 24 Dana Rohrabacher R-CA 46 Dianne Feinstein D-CA 23 Gerald Solomon R-NY 46 Edward Kennedy D-MA 20 Frank Pallone, Jr. D-NJ 44 Connie Mack R-FL 19

Twenty most frequent targets of human rights speeches

Target country

Speeches (Percent of all speeches coded)

Negative evaluations (Percent of speeches targeting country)

Sanctions proposals (Percent of negative

evaluations)

China 898 (32) 794 (88) 373 (47) Turkey 202 (7) 186 (92) 98 (53) India 173 (6) 103 (60) 72 (70) Cuba 161 (6) 153 (95) 86 (56) Indonesia 121 (4) 105 (87) 68 (65) Yugoslavia 90 (3) 89 (99) 48 (54) Vietnam 72 (3) 53 (74) 21 (40) Bosnia 72 (3) 11 (15) 4 (36) Taiwan 58 (2) 1 (2) 0 (0) Myanmar 55 (2) 55 (100) 41 (75) Russia 52 (2) 46 (88) 12 (26) Iran 44 (2) 44 (100) 12 (27) Sudan 43 (2) 43 (100) 21 (49) Azerbaijan 41 (1) 38 (93) 28 (74) Mexico 40 (1) 39 (98) 28 (72) Haiti 35 (1) 20 (57) 6 (30) Iraq 33 (1) 33 (100) 9 (27) Guatemala 33 (1) 18 (55) 6 (33) Colombia 30 (1) 20 (67) 12 (60) Pakistan 27 (1) 23 (85) 10 (43)

642 Commerce and Imagination

The upper panel in Table 2 lists the most active 10 senators and House members.

What is perhaps most striking about the members of Congress in Table 2 is their partisan and ideological diversity. The subject of human rights was clearly not the domain of a single party or ideological faction during the late 1990s. The list includes 10 Democrats and 10 Republicans, including well-known liber- als Nancy Pelosi and Edward Kennedy, and well-known conservatives as Dana Rohrabacher and Jesse Helms. The speeches included in the data examined here were frequently given by diverse groups of members who had come together to address a particular situation.

The speeches evaluated the human rights situation in 104 countries, and were overwhelmingly critical. Of the 2,778 evaluations, 2,149 (77%) were criti- cal, 325 (12%) were approving, and 304 (11%) were ambiguous or took no normative position. In 904 cases (33%), the speaker proposed that a specific sanction be imposed on the target country. Just as certain members of Congress were more likely to give speeches on human rights, some countries were far more likely to be criticized than others. The lower panel in Table 2 lists the 20 most evaluated countries and the number of critical speeches each received.

The list of speech targets in Table 2 raises several issues relevant to the empiri- cal analysis. First, China was by far the most frequently evaluated country. Nearly a third of all such speeches concerned China, and the judgments were over- whelmingly negative. We will return to this fact later in the analysis. Second, the speeches varied in their evaluations of human rights performance of the target countries, and also by whether they specifically called for economic sanctions of some kind. Any speech on the observance of human rights in another country arguably helps to put this issue on the agenda, but speeches that offer negative evaluations of another country arguably offer a more appropriate test of the link- age between this issue and constituent economic interests. We will examine both types of speeches in the empirical analysis that follows.

The aspects of each speech we coded were relatively simple, and the resulting data are quite reliable. Both coders gathered an overlapping 2 months of speeches in each of the 4 years included in the data set to permit reliability test- ing. There was 89% agreement in the coding of the variable used to distinguish the speeches here: whether each offered a positive, negative, or ambiguous evalu- ation of the country’s human rights performance. The principal source of inter- coder differences was not judgment about the content of each speech, but whether a particular remark qualified as a human rights speech under our cod- ing rules.

District and Member Characteristics

To test the hypotheses about economic interests discussed in the last section, we gathered data on both factor ownership and sectoral trade orientation by state and congressional district. The data on factor ownership were the easiest to obtain, and came primarily from census data assembled in Scott Adler’s Congres- sional District Dataset (Adler 2008). It includes data on median family income and union density, as well as on the foreign-born population of each state and dis- trict. To measure education, we gathered data on educational attainment directly from the 1990 Census of Population (United States Census Bureau 2008). To measure the individual members’ liberal-conservative ideological position, we use the first dimension of the DW-NOMINATE score (Carroll, et al. 2008).

Computing indices of export orientation and import sensitivity for each dis- trict was somewhat more complicated. Our data-gathering efforts proceeded in several stages. First, we used census data on industry of employment to measure

643Ellen A. Cutrone and Benjamin O. Fordham

the relative size of each of 17 sectors in the economy of each congressional district (United States Census Bureau 2008).1 Each sector was assigned a weight in the district’s economy corresponding to its share of total employment. Next, we divided national-level data on exports and imports of goods and services, as well as gross output, into equivalent sectors (United States Department of Com- merce 2008). For each sector, we computed an index of export orientation by dividing the volume of exports by gross output. We computed a corresponding index of import-sensitivity by dividing the volume of imports by the sum of imports and gross output in that sector. Finally, the sectoral export-orientation and import sensitivity indices were each summed over the 17 sectors using each sector’s proportion of total employment in the district as a weight, producing an overall index of export-orientation and import-sensitivity for each district in each year. The index for each Congress is an average of the 2 years that comprised it.

For the analysis of speech targets, we used data on exports from Gleditsch (2002). However, our hypotheses about the effect of imports on congressional speeches concern only imports that compete with domestic producers. Imports of goods and services not also produced domestically should not generate politi- cal resistance. In light of this problem, we first divided commodity data on imports from the Department of Commerce into 23 groups corresponding to NAICS sectors on which we had data on domestic employment. We then multi- plied the volume of imports in each of these sectors by that sector’s share of total employment in the United States. Imports of goods produced in sectors employing larger numbers of Americans were thus weighted more heavily than goods produced in sectors that employed few Americans. The sum across all sec- tors yields an index of the extent to which imports from each country compete with domestic production in the United States.

International Conditions

Data on the actual human rights practices of states are important for testing whether states with worse human rights records are actually the ones targeted by members of Congress. Data on the human rights practices of the target state come from the CIRI dataset (Cingranelli and Richards 1999). Their Physical Integrity Rights Index is used in this study as an aggregate index of human rights. Its four components include indicators of torture, extrajudicial killing, political imprisonment, and disappearance. The index is scored from 0 to 8, with higher values indicating greater respect for human rights. We used complemen- tary data from Ramos et al. (2007) on media coverage of human rights condi- tions in particular countries, and press releases by Amnesty International about them.

We obtained data on other international conditions from several sources. The foreign aid figures used here indicate total US economic and military assistance to each country for each year in millions of constant dollars from the ‘‘Green- book’’ database (US Agency for International Development 2008). Data on American alliances come from the Correlates of War Project (Gibler and Sarkees 2004) and indicate defense pacts with the United States. The Correlates of

1 In principle, sectors could be weighted by output rather than employment. Unfortunately, output data from the Census of Manufactures cannot be aggregated into congressional districts as employment data from the Census of Population can. The 17 sectors on which 1990 census data were available are as follows, with their NAICS codes in parentheses: Agriculture, forestry, and fisheries (000–039); Mining (040–059); Construction (060–099), Manufac- turing, nondurable goods (100–229); Manufacturing, durable goods (230–399); Transportation (400–439); Commu- nications and other public utilities (440–499); Wholesale trade (500–579); Retail trade (580–699); Finance, insurance, and real estate (700–720); Business and repair services (721–760); Personal services (761–799); Entertain- ment and recreation services (800–811); Health services (812–840); Educational services (842–860); Other profes- sional and related services (841, 861–899); Public administration (900–939).

644 Commerce and Imagination

War Project also provided data on militarized interstate disputes with the United States (Ghosn, Palmer, and Bremer 2004). We assembled the Correlates of War data using EUGene (Bennett and Stam 2000).

Empirical Results

The empirical analysis consists of two sets of models. The first concerns individ- ual members’ decisions to give speeches on human rights. These models test hypotheses about differences between individual members of Congress. The sec- ond set focuses on the targets of aggregate human rights concern by the Con- gress as a whole. These are especially important for testing the influence of humanitarian concerns and international political interests, which imply similar pressures on individual members of Congress.

The dependent variables in both sets of models are counts of speeches in a particular congress. We estimated the models using a population-averaged time- series cross-sectional negative binomial model. In order to deal with the correla- tion between observations of the same members of Congress in each of the two congresses for which we have data, we specified a first-order autoregressive corre- lation structure. This resulted in the omission from our estimation sample of 169 members who served in only one congress but provides a more conservative test of the hypotheses we have proposed. Models without the autoregressive coali- tion structure produced substantively similar results though with smaller stan- dard errors in most cases.

Who Speaks Out?

Table 3 presents the results of four models of speeches on human rights in the House of Representatives. The models all take the number of speeches given by an individual member during a 2-year Congress as a dependent variable, but focus on different categories of speeches. The first includes all speeches that evaluated other countries’ human rights performance negatively. The second includes only those calling for trade sanctions. The third focuses on speeches criticizing countries with which the United States has an alliance. The fourth includes only speeches criticizing countries with which the United States has recently had militarized disputes.

Because of the many institutional differences between the two chambers, we estimated each model separately on the House of Representatives and the Sen- ate. None of the Senate models indicated any statistically significant relation- ships. For reasons of space, we have chosen not to report them here. Our data do not reveal why the two chambers differ but there are several possible reasons. Perhaps the most obvious is that we have more information about the House: the analysis of the Senate rests on only 170 observations compared to the 718 available for the House. Another likely contributing factor is that Senators from large and diverse states might have several possible reelection constituencies and thus more discretion in whether they respond to constituents who favor or oppose placing human rights on the public agenda. To make matters worse ana- lytically, states vary greatly in size while House districts have roughly the same population. Senators might thus vary more than House members in their need to respond to particular constituent interests as well as generally facing less pres- sure to do so, making both the effects to be estimated smaller and their variance larger. Finally, because most states are larger than congressional districts, there is also less variation in many constituency characteristics. For example, there are no entirely urban states but there are a number of entirely urban House districts. This pattern affects the variables in our model. The variance in the percentage of the population born outside the United States and the percentage with some

645Ellen A. Cutrone and Benjamin O. Fordham

college is roughly twice as large in congressional districts as it is in states. The fact that states are less distinctive than congressional districts makes it more diffi- cult to discern the effects of their special characteristics on Senators.

The results in Table 3 offer evidence that House members were influenced by economic, political, and humanitarian concerns. In order to make the results easier to interpret, the lower panel in the table summarizes the effects of the variables that were statistically significant. The first row in this section gives pre- dicted speech counts holding all independent variables at their means. The remainder of the table indicates the change in this value associated with a one standard deviation change in the indicated independent variable. For ease of comparison, we computed the impact of decreases in independent variables with negative coefficients, and increases in independent variables with positive coeffi- cients. All the changes are thus positive.

Turning first to the results concerning trade interests, the model supports the sector-specific factors hypotheses but not those based on factor ownership. Edu- cation is not statistically significant in any of the models. Income performs more like an indicator of cosmopolitanism than of trade interests. (We will have more to say about this variable below.) By contrast, except in the model of speeches

TABLE 3. Event Count Models of the Number of Human Rights Speeches by Members of the 104th and 105th House of Representatives

Critical speeches

Calls for sanctions

Speeches critical of allies

Speeches critical

of rivals

Export-orientation )38.53* (14.55) )44.18* (19.41) )45.62* (26.48) )91.07* (15.62) Import-sensitivity 39.76* (12.43) 59.79* (18.39) 31.38 (26.06) 98.24* (15.50) Unionization (percent of workforce)

0.002 (0.015) )0.001 (0.02) )0.02 (0.02) 0.01 (0.02)

Percent of district with at least some college

)0.02 (0.02) )0.001 (0.02) )0.04 (0.03) )0.004 (0.02)

Median family income (thousands of dollars)

0.07* (0.02) 0.05 (0.03) 0.09* (0.03) 0.05* (0.02)

Ideology (first dimension DW-NOMINATE score)

)0.23 (0.23) )0.23 (0.40) )1.10* (0.35) 0.04 (0.26)

Percent of district born outside United States

0.04* (0.01) 0.04* (0.01) 0.03* (0.01) 0.04* (0.01)

Constant )2.04* (0.60) )4.07* (0.61) )2.72* (1.01) )3.59* (0.56) Observations 718 718 718 718

Changes in predicted speech counts by changes in statistically significant variables

Predicted count with all variables at mean values

1.48 0.38 0.24 0.70

Export-orientation +0.96 +0.29 +0.18 +1.57 Import-sensitivity +1.04 +0.46 +1.91 Median family income (thousands of dollars)

+1.41 +0.30 +0.42

Ideology (first dimension DW-NOMINATE score)

+0.14

Percent of district born outside United States

+0.63 +0.17 +0.08 +0.35

(Notes. The models were estimated using a population-averaged negative binomial GEE panel model assuming an

AR(1) correlation structure. Robust standard errors adjusted for clustering on the member are reported in parenthe-

ses. Asterisks indicate statistical significance at the p < .05 level. The predicted counts in the lower section of the table

are based on the results presented in the upper section. Values are the increase in predicted event counts when indi-

cated variable is increased one standard deviation above its mean value for variables with positive coefficients, and one

standard deviation below the mean value for variables with negative coefficients.)

646 Commerce and Imagination

criticizing allies, both the export-orientation and import-sensitivity of their dis- tricts influenced representatives’ propensity to speak about human rights in the ways we hypothesized. As the numbers at the bottom of Table 3 indicate, the effects associated with export orientation and import sensitivity are substantively as well as statistically significant.

Humanitarian concerns also made a difference. The percentage of foreign- born persons in the district was positively associated with the frequency of all four categories of speeches. The effects associated with this variable were sub- stantively significant, but not as large as those associated with trade interests. Lib- eral-conservative ideology did not have a statistically significant effect in the models of the number of critical speeches or of those calling for trade sanctions, something that is not surprising in view of the list of frequent human rights speakers presented in Table 2. Its effects in the third model, to which we will turn shortly, are consistent with the influence of American international political interests rather than humanitarian concerns.

Because arguments about economic interests and humanitarian concerns make contrasting predictions about the relationship between education, income, and human rights speeches, results concerning these variables are especially important. Education and income should be associated with cosmopolitanism and foreign policy internationalism, something that suggests humanitarian con- cerns should be more salient in districts with higher concentrations of wealthy and educated voters. On the other hand, education and income are associated with rising income as a result of growing international trade, a consideration that suggests raising human rights issues might not be in the self-interest of these individuals. The results support the influence of humanitarian concerns over economic interests related to factor ownership. Education is not statistically sig- nificant, and income in their district is positively associated with members’ human rights speeches. Moreover, as the marginal effects in Table 3 indicate, the effect of median family income is quite large.

There is at least one possible problem with taking these results as evidence that cosmopolitanism trumps factor ownership, however. Education is arguably a better indicator of cosmopolitanism than income, but has the opposite sign and only narrowly misses the conventional threshold for statistical significance in some of the models. This outcome suggests that the effects of these two variables may embody something more than just cosmopolitanism. Ultimately, the ques- tion of whether the effects of education and income work through cosmopolitan- ism, economic interests, or some other mechanism will have to be answered at the individual level. The safest conclusion about the aggregate effects of these variables on congressional human rights concern is that cosmopolitanism accounts better for the observable patterns, but that factor ownership might still have a smaller countervailing effect.

Finally, the results offer minimal evidence for the influence of American inter- national political interests on the human rights concerns of members of Con- gress. As expected, conservative members of Congress were somewhat less likely to criticize allies than liberals were. Although this effect was statistically signifi- cant, the predicted speech counts presented in Table 3 indicate that it was sub- stantively small. The models produced no evidence that conservatives were more likely than liberals to criticize countries when they had had recent militarized dis- putes with the United States.

Another issue raised earlier in the paper concerns the mechanism through which sectoral economic interests, like those associated with export orientation and import sensitivity, influence members of Congress. It is possible that mem- bers from import-sensitive districts consciously target for criticism countries that compete with their constituents, and that members from export-oriented dis- tricts are correspondingly soft on countries where their constituents’ foreign

647Ellen A. Cutrone and Benjamin O. Fordham

markets are located. Alternatively, import-competing districts may simply be more likely to elect representatives who are ideologically predisposed to raise human rights issues across the board, and export-oriented districts may have the opposite tendency. The results in Table 3, which focus on decisions to raise human rights issues, are equally compatible with both these mechanisms. The two causal stories diverge when it comes to the targeting of specific countries, however. The first implies that specific features of trade with particular coun- tries should influence members’ decisions about targeting that country, while the second suggests that only the overall trade orientation of the district should matter.

Table 4 presents the results of four models of human rights speeches targeting China, one of the few countries for which a test of the specific-targeting hypothe- sis is plausible. Our district-level data on sectoral employment are not sufficiently fine-grained to capture the different implications of trade with potential targets unless they have a high volume of trade with the United States. It is only because China exports a broad range of manufactured products to the United States that treating it as a competitor in all congressional districts dominated by such broadly defined sectors as ‘‘durable goods manufacturing’’ is at all reasonable. Making such an assumption about a trading partner that exported a relatively narrow range of goods to the United States would be exceedingly unrealistic and correspondingly unlikely to turn up evidence of specific targeting. Even in the Chinese case, this is a difficult test.

In spite of the difficulties with the data, the empirical results support the spe- cific-targeting hypotheses with respect to China in both the House and the Sen- ate. In the models of all critical speeches, export-orientation toward China reduces members’ propensity to criticize the country’s human rights perfor- mance, while import-sensitivity increases it. In the models of speeches calling for trade sanctions, import-sensitivity has the expected positive effect, but export-ori- entation narrowly misses the threshold for statistical significance. A one standard deviation increase in sensitivity to Chinese imports was associated with an

TABLE 4. Event Count Models of the Number of Human Rights Speeches Criticizing China by Members of the 104th and 105th Congresses

House Senate

Critical speeches Calls for sanctions Critical speeches Calls for sanctions

China-specific

export-orientation

)5,185.25* (1,213.15) )2,908.14 (1,621.68) )10,531.31* (3,604.76) )11,929.59 (6,797.93)

China-specific

import sensitivity

1,440.67* (297.45) 940.59* (417.11) 3,241.46* (923.78) 4,037.30* (1,655.39)

Unionization

(percent of workforce)

0.01 (0.02) )0.003 (0.03) 0.03 (0.03) 0.04 (0.05)

Percent of district with

at least some college

0.02 (0.02) 0.02 (0.02) 0.06* (0.03) 0.03 (0.04)

Median family income

(thousands of dollars)

0.04 (0.02) 0.04 (0.03) )0.06 (0.03) )0.16* (0.06)

Ideology (first dimension

DW-NOMINATE score)

)0.13 (0.27) )0.37 (0.46) )0.29 (0.57) )0.03 (1.06)

Percent of district born

outside United States

0.02* (0.01) 0.02 (0.02) 0.02 (0.07) 0.09 (0.11)

Constant )3.50* (0.52) )4.40 (0.68) )2.88 (1.61) )1.83 (2.55) Observations 718 718 170 170

(Notes. The models were estimated using a population-averaged negative binomial GEE panel model assuming an

AR(1) correlation structure. Robust standard errors adjusted for clustering on the member are reported in parenthe-

ses. Asterisks indicate statistical significance at the p < .05 level.)

648 Commerce and Imagination

increase in the expected number of negative speeches from 0.59 to 1.77 in the House and from 0.87 to 10.12 in the Senate. The effects of import sensitivity on speeches calling for trade sanctions were roughly the same size. A one standard deviation increase in this variable would increase the expected number of speeches from 0.24 to 0.48 in the House and from 0.18 to 6.56 in the Senate. Export orientation only affected the number of negative speeches, not the num- ber calling for sanctions. A one standard deviation decline in this variable would increase the expected number of speeches on China from 0.59 to 1.88 in the House and from 0.87 to 15.48 in the Senate.

Whose Record Is Criticized?

Models of the aggregate number of speeches about potential targets are espe- cially important for testing arguments about pressures that should be experi- enced similarly by each member of Congress. As we noted in the last section, claims that either humanitarian concern or American international political interests drive human rights rhetoric fall into this category. The evidence con- cerning individual members’ propensities to speak out on international human rights suggests that the cosmopolitanism of their districts makes members more likely to raise these issues. There is weaker evidence that conservatives may be less likely than liberals to criticize American allies. However, neither of these considerations has as much influence on the behavior of individual members as the economic interests of their constituents, especially in shaping their choices about which country to criticize. The most likely reason for this outcome is that differences in the extent to which individual members experience pressure to speak out based on humanitarian concerns or political interests are small. The aggregate effect of these pressures on the countries targeted may nevertheless be substantial. In this section, we will compare these aggregate effects to those asso- ciated with the tendency for members to target countries that compete economi- cally with their constituents, and to spare those that provide their constituents with important markets.

Table 5 presents the results of three models testing hypotheses about the influence of economic interests, humanitarian concerns, and American political interests on the number of human rights speeches made about three sets of potential targets. The first model includes all 140 countries on which we have data. If members of Congress raise human rights concerns in order to serve American political and economic interests, regardless of their target’s actual human rights record, this pattern should be evident in this model. It is not. Reassuringly, the results suggest that actual human rights conditions matter most, as one would expect if humanitarian concern were the most important motive for raising human rights concerns. Actual human rights conditions, as reflected in the Cingranelli and Richards Physical Integrity Rights Index, are the most important influence on the number of speeches criticizing a country’s human rights record.

For ease of interpretation, Table 6 presents the changes in the predicted annual speech count associated with changes in the statistically significant inde- pendent variables. The marginal effects in Table 6 can be interpreted the same way as those reported in Table 3. In the first model, the expected number of speeches declines as the Physical Integrity Rights Index improves. Other variables associated with humanitarian concerns also make a difference. News coverage, as reflected in the index of articles in Newsweek and The Economist, has a relatively small effect, perhaps because the Physical Integrity Rights Index embodies the information the media provide. More populous countries draw greater criticism, as one would expect in view of the fact that widespread human rights abuses there will affect more people. By contrast, of the variables associated with

649Ellen A. Cutrone and Benjamin O. Fordham

political or economic interests, only the number of recent disputes with United States is statistically significant.

The model treating all countries as potential targets of criticism suggests that members do not raise spurious human rights concerns in order to serve Ameri- can political or economic interests. However, these interests might still shape which real violations receive American attention. The number of speeches associ- ated with increasing values of the Physical Integrity Rights Index does not decline steadily. The numbers of speeches associated with the lowest five values are quite close, and none is significantly different from that associated with the lowest possible score on the index. This suggests that considerations other than actual human rights conditions shape which of these countries draw American attention. We estimated the second and third models on two samples of coun- tries that have had at least some human rights violations. The second includes only the 36 countries that had Physical Integrity Rights Index values of 4 or lower in all 4 years considered here. The third model includes the 84 countries that had scores of four or lower in at least 1 year. Dividing the sample in this way is identical to including an interaction term making all the estimated effects conditional on the countries having the indicated level of human rights viola- tions, though the results are easier to interpret.

TABLE 5. Event Count Models of Annual Number of Congressional Speeches Criticizing Each Country

All states

States in sample

Index < 5 in all years

Index < 5 in at least 1 year

Physical Integrity Rights Index = 1 )0.36 (0.31) )0.50 (0.30) )0.41 (0.30) Physical Integrity Rights Index = 2 0.04 (0.37) 0.04 (0.27) 0.09 (0.35) Physical Integrity Rights Index = 3 )0.41 (0.56) )0.50 (0.34) )0.63 (0.47) Physical Integrity Rights Index = 4 )0.41 (0.44) 0.11 (0.40) )0.38 (0.40) Physical Integrity Rights Index = 5 )1.01* (0.45) )0.81* (0.40) Physical Integrity Rights Index = 6 )1.24* (0.44) )1.23* (0.42) Physical Integrity Rights Index = 7 )1.16* (0.54) )2.00* (0.46) Physical Integrity Rights Index = 8 )1.80* (0.63) )0.72 (0.70)

Wald test of joint significance for values of physical integrity index

v2 = 18.16* (8 df) v2 = 6.25 (4 df) v2 = 40.86* (8 df)

Amnesty International news releases 0.03 (0.02) 0.01 (0.02) 0.01 (0.02) Index of media coverage of human rights performance

0.11* (0.03) 0.06 (0.05) 0.08* (0.03)

Log of target population (millions) 0.55* (0.23) )0.52 (0.54) 0.04 (0.27) Alliance with United States 0.51 (0.37) 0.40 (1.08) 1.28 (0.69) Value of US foreign aid to target 0.08 (0.14) 1.69 (0.98) 0.39 (0.25) Number of militarized disputes with United States in previous 10 years

0.34* (0.09) )0.12 (0.09) 0.09 (0.07)

Log of US exports to target )0.51 (0.50) )2.30* (0.96) )2.01* (0.80) Log of target exports to United States, weighted by US employment in sector

1.01 (1.85) 10.79* (4.00) 8.59* (3.68)

Log of US foreign direct investment in target country

)0.15 (0.35) 0.03 (0.38) )0.06 (0.47)

Log of target country GDP 0.21 (0.24) 1.53* (0.49) 1.06* (0.28) Constant )5.14* (1.70) )5.75 (3.85) )2.25 (1.94) Observations 556 141 332 States 140 36 84

(Notes. The models were estimated using a population-averaged negative binomial GEE panel model assuming

an AR(1) correlation structure. Robust standard errors adjusted for clustering on the member are reported in paren-

theses. Asterisks indicate statistical significance at the p < .05 level.)

650 Commerce and Imagination

The results from these two models have several important implications for the arguments tested here. First, while there were substantial differences in the number of speeches targeting countries with serious human rights problems and the number targeting those with better records, human rights conditions did not significantly influence congressional concern within these two broad categories. Countries with physical integrity indices between 5 and 8 received much less crit- icism than those with indices between 0 and 4, but marginal differences within these two groups were not statistically significant. More concretely, members of Congress rarely criticized countries that had good human rights records, but the most serious violators did not receive proportionally greater attention.

Second, economic interests strongly influence which human rights violators received American criticism. As Table 6 indicates, one standard deviation changes in exports or weighted imports were associated with much greater num- bers of human rights speeches. Exports and imports are correlated with the GDP of the trading partner, which was also an important predictor of the number of human rights speeches. GDP displaced population as an indicator of country size in the models of speeches about human rights violators. Members of Congress may not have invented human rights violations with which to criticize those who competed economically with their constituents, but economic interests influ- enced which human rights violations they noticed. Economically large human rights violators received the greatest criticism, especially when they competed economically with American producers in the US market and provided a rela- tively small market for American exporters. Like the results concerning individ- ual members’ targeting of China in the last section, this outcome is consistent with the argument that members of Congress use human rights concerns as part of a political strategy for protecting the economic interests of their constituents.

Even though China was the target of a large proportion of the speeches, it was not an influential outlier in any of the models in Table 5. Coupled with the exis- tence of substantial human rights violations there, China’s economic size and its high level of trade with the United States account for the extensive attention the

TABLE 6. Changes in Predicted Speech Counts by Changes in Statistically Significant Variables

All states

States in sample

Index < 5 in all years

Index < 5 in at least 1 year

Baseline predicted count 1.23 6.13 1.71 Physical Integrity Rights Index = 5 )0.56 )0.59 Physical Integrity Rights Index = 6 )0.70 )0.98 Physical Integrity Rights Index = 7 )0.65 )1.37 Physical Integrity Rights Index = 8 +0.07 Index of media coverage of human rights performance

+0.26 0.32

Log of target population (millions) +1.58 Number of militarized disputes with United States in previous 10 years

+1.02

Log of US exports to target +29.39 +3.99 Log of target exports to United States, weighted by US employment in sector

+14.37 +1.68

Log of target country GDP +82.64 +8.21

(Notes. Predicted counts are based on the models presented in Table 5. Except for values of the human rights vari-

ables, values are changes in predicted counts when indicated variable is increased one standard deviation above its

mean value for variables with positive coefficients. For the Physical Integrity Rights Index, the change in the predicted

count is that associated with a shift from 4 to the indicated value, and one standard deviation below the mean value

for variables with negative coefficients. The baseline value sets the Physical Integrity Rights Index to 4, the alliance vari-

able at 0, and all other variables to their mean value.)

651Ellen A. Cutrone and Benjamin O. Fordham

country received in Congress during the late 1990s. All of the results predict large numbers of speeches targeting China, with the two sets of estimates from samples of human rights violators coming closest to the mark.2 Excluding China from the estimation sample does not substantively change the results. The variables that are statistically significant in Table 5 remain so when China is removed.

Finally, there is little evidence that American international political interests shaped congressional attention to human rights. Alliances with the potential tar- get had no statistically significant effect on the propensity of Congress to raise human rights concerns about the country. The similarly insignificant results con- cerning aid provide no support for explanations stressing either humanitarian concerns or political interests.3 The only exception to the weak results concern- ing American international political interests is the number of dyadic disputes in the preceding 10 years, which was statistically significant in the model examining all countries. The fact that this result did not hold up in the models of human rights violators calls its robustness into question. The apparent unimportance of these political variables may be an artifact of the time period considered here. The 1990s—after the end of the Cold War and before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001—were a period when international threats were not especially salient. A similar analysis of data drawn from the Cold War era or the period since September 11, 2001, might well produce different results.

Conclusion

What can congressional speeches tell us about American foreign policy? In assessing the results presented here, it is important to look beyond the immedi- ate impact of the individual floor speeches themselves. The point here is not that these speeches directly influence policy but rather that they reflect the agenda-setting efforts of members of Congress. The floor of Congress is not the only venue for agenda-setting activity, but it is an especially important and visible one. Even if they are not translated into policy, attempts to put the human rights record of particular countries onto the agenda still matter. These efforts consti- tute the political landscape in which executive branch policymakers and congres- sional leaders must operate. These leaders may be able to block or divert the demands of individual members of Congress, but doing so carries political costs. Moreover, issues raised in Congress, as well as in other public settings, can influ- ence American foreign relations even when they do not make policy. Harsh criti- cism of the Chinese human rights record during the debates over renewal of MFN status for China affected US relations with that country even though policy did not change. Knowing why issues like human rights come up, or fail to do so, is important.

The empirical evidence surveyed here supports several conclusions about the sources of concern about international human rights in Congress. First, mem- bers of Congress use human rights issues as a way to protect their constituents’ economic interests. House members whose constituents compete with foreign imports raise these issues more frequently. Those whose constituents rely on for- eign markets do so less often. Moreover, evidence concerning individual mem- bers’ decisions to criticize Chinese human rights performance and the aggregate

2 As Table 2 indicates, the actual number of critical speeches targeting China was 794. The first model in Table 5 predicts 1,560 speeches on the country. The second predicts 853, and the third 1,125.

3 It is possible that both these concerns apply and tend to cancel one another out. If this is the case, then human rights concerns should increase with aid at relatively low levels, but diminish at very high levels of aid, which indicate countries that have special political relationships with the United States, like Egypt and Israel, or are facing especially serious security problems, like Colombia or Iraq. We tested this possibility by adding the square of aid to the model. This specification did not change the results concerning aid.

652 Commerce and Imagination

number of speeches targeting each country suggests that members’ propensity to raise, or refrain from raising, human rights issues about specific countries depends in part on their constituents’ economic interests in those countries. The association between trade interests and human rights speeches is thus not entirely the result of the selection of ideologically committed members by import-competing constituencies. In Hobson’s terms, the commercial indeed exploited the imaginative to some extent.

The influence of economic interests does not mean that humanitarian con- cerns are merely a fig leaf for these interests, however. The cosmopolitanism of their district, as indicated by median family income and the percent of the popu- lation born outside the United States, also influenced House members’ propensi- ties to speak out on international human rights. Our analysis of the aggregate number of human rights speeches targeting each country also indicates that members did not invent spurious human rights criticisms in order to protect their constituents’ economic interests. Instead, they focused on real human rights violators, but tended to select those who competed with their constituents, and refrain from attacking those who provided their constituents with major for- eign markets.

We found far less evidence that American international political interests influ- enced congressional attention to human rights. There was some evidence that conservatives, who have a tendency to prioritize national security, were more likely to refrain from criticizing American allies, but they were no more likely than liberals to criticize countries with which the United States has recently had disputes. At the aggregate level, neither alliances nor aid influenced whether countries were targeted for human rights criticism.

In spite of the lack of evidence for the influence of political interests here, it would be a mistake to conclude that these interests are generally irrelevant. We selected the 1990s precisely because we believed that security issues during this period would be less likely to complicate our comparison between economic interests and humanitarian concerns. During the Cold War, or in the years since the September 11 terrorist attacks, security concerns may have played a much more important role. We expect differences between liberals and conservatives over the relative importance of security issues would have a larger effect on efforts to put human rights on the agenda in these different contexts. When the trade-off between security concerns and human rights is steeper, the ranks of those speaking out on human rights might become less ideologically diverse. If, as previous research suggests, conservatives place a greater premium on security, then they should be less willing than liberals to trade it away to promote human rights. Ultimately, whether our findings apply to the Cold War or the post-9 ⁄ 11 period is a question for future research.

How should we regard the influence of economic interests on the role of human rights in American foreign policy? The patterns we found in the evidence examined here point to several normative concerns. To the extent that American attention to human rights practices in other countries may lead to improve- ments, it is less troubling that economic interests make human rights more sali- ent in some cases than that these interests may lead these issues to be ignored in others. More broadly, the use of human rights rhetoric to promote American economic interests undermines the credibility of the American commitment to the principle that human rights should be universally observed. If the effective- ness of American attention to human rights depends on this credibility—an assumption we have not tested here—then the patterns we have found should be a source of concern.

At the same time, one should not overemphasize the hypocrisy of congressio- nal attention to human rights. Some members of Congress, such as those listed in Table 2, give far more speeches about human rights than our models predict.

653Ellen A. Cutrone and Benjamin O. Fordham

These individuals are acting on principles they take quite seriously, and account for a substantial share of congressional attention to human rights. To the extent that these human rights advocates are able to find economically motivated allies motivated in some cases, the imaginative may exploit the commercial rather than the other way around.

References

Adler, E. Scott. (2008) Congressional District Data File. Boulder: University of Colorado. Available at http://socsci.colorado.edu/~esadler/Congressional_District_Data.html. (Accessed May 28, 2008.)

Bennett, D. Scott, and Allan Stam. (2000) EUGene: A Conceptual Manual. International Interac- tions 26: 179–204.

Bernstein, Roger A., and William W. Anthony. (1974) The ABM Issue in the Senate, 1968–1970: The Importance of Ideology. American Political Science Review 68 (3): 1198–1206.

Carroll, Royce, Jeff Lewis, James Lo, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal. (2008) DW-NOMINATE Scores with Bootstrapped Standard Errors. Available at the Voteview Website http://voteview.org/. (Accessed May 28, 2008.)

Cingranelli, David, and David Richards. (1999) Measuring the Level, Pattern, and Sequence of Government Respect for Physical Integrity Rights. International Studies Quarterly 43 (2): 407– 418.

Congressional Quarterly Almanac. (1997) Vol. LIII, 105th Congress, First Session. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly.

Congressional Quarterly Almanac. (1998) Vol. LIV, 105th Congress, Second Session. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly.

Congressional Record. (2008) Available through GPO Access at http://www.gpoaccess.gov/ crecord/index.html. (Accessed May 28, 2008.)

Donnelly, Jack. (1989) Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Fordham, Benjamin O. (2008) Economic Interests and Public Support for American Global Activism. International Organization 62 (1): 163–182.

Fordham, Benjamin O., and Timothy J. McKeown. (2003) Selection and Influence: Interest Groups and Congressional Voting on Trade Policy. International Organization 57 (3): 519–549.

Ghosn, Faten, Glenn Palmer, and Stuart Bremer. (2004) The MID3 Data Set, 1993–2001: Procedures, Coding Rules, and Description. Conflict Management and Peace Science 21: 133–154.

Gibler, Douglas M., and Meredith Sarkees. (2004) Measuring Alliances: The Correlates of War Formal Interstate Alliance Data Set, 1816–2000. Journal of Peace Research 41 (2): 211–222.

Gleditsch, Kristian S. (2002) Expanded Trade and GDP Data. Journal of Conflict Resolution 46 (5): 712–724.

Hafner-Burton, Emelie. (2005) Trading Human Rights: How Preferential Trade Agreements Influence Government Repression. International Organization 59 (3): 593–629.

Hiscox, Michael J. (2001) Class Versus Industry Cleavages: Inter-Industry Factor Mobility and the Politics of Trade. International Organization 55 (1): 1–46.

Hiscox, Michael J. (2002) International Trade and Political Conflict. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hobson, J. A. (1965 [1902]) Imperialism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Hulse, Carl. (2008) Pelosi Wants Bush to Weigh Skipping Olympic Ceremony. New York Times, April

2. Kirkpatrick, Jeanne J. (1979) Dictatorships and Double Standards. Commentary 68: 34–45. Liang, Yan. (2008) Commentary: On the Hypocrisy of Pelosi’s Double Standards. Xinhua (English

edition), April 13. Lindsay, James M. (1991) Parochialism, Policy, and Constituency Constraints: Congressional Voting

on Strategic Weapons Systems. American Journal of Political Science 34 (4): 936–960. McCormick, James M., and Neil J. Mitchell. (2007) Commitments, Transnational Interests, and

Congress. Political Research Quarterly 60 (4): 579–592. Poe, Steven, Sabine C. Carey, and Tanya C. Vazquez. (2001) How Are These Pictures Different? A

Quantitative Comparison of the US State Department and Amnesty International Human Rights Reports, 1976–1995 Human Rights Quarterly 23 (3): 650–677.

Ramos, Howard, James Ron, and Oskar N. T. Thoms. (2007) Shaping the Northern Media’s Human Rights Coverage, 1986–2006. Journal of Peace Research 44 (4): 385–406.

654 Commerce and Imagination

Rhodes, Cecil. (1900) Cecil Rhodes: His Political Life and Speeches. London: Chapman and Hall. Rogowski, Ronald. (1989) Commerce and Coalitions: How Trade Affects Domestic Political Alignments.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Scheve, Kenneth F., and Matthew J. Slaughter. (2001) What Determines Individual Trade-Policy

Preferences? Journal of International Economics 54 (2): 267–292. Stolper, Wolfgang F., and Paul A. Samuelson. (1941) Protection and Real Wages. Review of

Economic Studies 9: 58–73. United States Census Bureau. (2008) 1990 Census of Population. Available at http://factfinder.

census.gov/. (Accessed May 28, 2008.) United States Department of Commerce. (2008) Trade in Goods and Services. Available at

http://www.bea.gov/international/index.htm. (Accessed May 28, 2008.) US Agency for International Development. (2008) U.S. Overseas Loans and Grants: Obligations

and Loan Authorizations, July 1, 1945–September 30, 2005. Available at http://qesdb.cdie.org/ gbk/index.htm. (Accessed May 28, 2008.)

Wayman, Frank Whelon. (1985) Arms Control and Strategic Arms Voting in the U.S. Senate: Patterns of Change, 1967–1983. Journal of Conflict Resolution 29 (2): 225–251.

655Ellen A. Cutrone and Benjamin O. Fordham