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Democracy and Compliance with Human Rights Treaties: The Conditional Effectiveness of the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women


 Research on international human rights law suggests that the beneficial effects of treaties depend on the strength of democratic political institutions. However, democracies are, by definition, compliant with many provisions in treaties that protect civil and political rights. Additionally, theories of compliance derive from a focus on civil and political rights rather than on other rights, so we lack a good understanding of whether predictions hold for other kinds of rights. We examine compliance with the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which protects rights that are distinct from those that characterize democratic governance. To measure compliance, we create a new indicator of women's rights that offers several advantages over existing indicators. We examine the conditional effect of CEDAW using models that allow for heterogenous treaty effects. This helps to adjudicate between theories that expect treaties to be most effective in highly democratic countries and those that expect them to be most effective among partial democracies. Our findings do not support either expectation and suggest that effectiveness does not depend on democracy, at least in the case of CEDAW. This points to the need to enrich existing theories of ratification and compliance by accounting for differences in the nature of the rights protected by different treaties.