Institutional complexity and state compliance with international human rights

Abstract

The visit by Prof. James Hollyer is directly connected with a research project by the Principal Investigator (PI), which is a key development of the PI's research visit - as a visiting scholar - at Perry World House, University of Pennsylvania, during July-September 2017 (funded by Fapesp). This research visit led to the thesis manuscript that substantiated the PI's promotion to Associate Professor at the International Relations Institute, University of Sao Paulo (IRI-USP), via "concurso de livre docência" in December of 2017.The manuscript analyzes the relationship between institutional complexity and state compliance with international human rights within the Inter-American Human Rights System. Institutional complexity is understood as the presence of overlapping, parallel and/or nesting institutions (Alter and Meunier 2009). State compliance is assessed via quantitative indicators of the prevalence of repression, as a proxy to measure levels of protection of rights to physical integrity (the right to life and the prohibition of torture). As the thesis manuscript proposes, there are several expectations related to regime type that inform conjectures on the relationship between the presence of complexity, on one hand, and observed levels of repression, on the other hand. At the current stage, the research project falls short of proposing a mechanism that explains preliminary empirical findings consistently linking democracy to more compliance, in the presence of complexity.Prof. James Hollyer's long research trajectory on regime type, especially his new co-authored work on transparency, makes him an ideal collaborator when it comes to mapping possible explanatory mechanisms and electing the ones that are most likely at work in the special case of the Inter-American Human Rights System - with a focus to the three case studies currently covered by the research project: Brazil, Chile and Peru. His contribution will also go in the direction of identifying suitable indicators to monitor the explanatory mechanism at work, during the period under investigation (1976-2016). Here, his recent work on transparency and the measure of transparency that he and co-authors developed will provide an analytical platform to launch our empirical thinking. (AU)