Recession, then Repression? Protests, Human Rights, and the International Monetary Fund Open Access

Abstract

How do international institutions affect domestic politics and policy? In particular, how does the International Monetary Fund (IMF) condition the behavior of citizens and the state, and to what extent can it effect human rights? One side of this debate posits that the IMF should only improve human rights by improving access to markets, financial stability, and resolving balance of payments crises. On the other hand, being under a program with the IMF – particularly a program with adjustment terms attached – could make human rights worse by leading to painful, structural changes that displace labor and disrupt livelihoods. In this thesis, I use several techniques and improvements on existing work, including matching and monthly data, to assess these arguments. I find evidence for the latter claim: that being under an IMF program leads to increased protests and repression. However, this result is driven entirely by the inclusion of conditionality terms, economic policy adjustment conditions dictated by the IMF, which lead to worse human rights performance by inducing protest and repressive action by the state in return. Moreover, citizens may anticipate the effects of a program by protesting – and the state may respond by repressing – even before a program’s onset, though this result is not robust. Examining this issue is of normative and empirical importance, probing the extent to which large international institutions can lead to domestic political strife and human rights violations and offering lessons for future IMF program design. 

Table of Contents

1 Introduction 1

1.1 Motivating case and questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1.2 International Financial Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

2 Literature review 6

2.1 Affecting Human Rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

2.2 International Financial Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

2.2.1 Grievance mechanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

2.2.2 IFIs and disregard for human rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

3 Theory 16

3.1 Backlash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

3.2 Anticipation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

4 Empirical Analysis 24

4.1 Independent Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

4.1.1 Economic Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

4.1.2 Noneconomic Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

4.2 Dependent Variable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

4.3 Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

5 Results 34

5.1 Backlash Hypotheses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

5.2 Anticipation Hypotheses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .42

6 Discussion and Conclusion 47

About this Master's Thesis

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Political Science
Degree	M.A.
Submission	Master's Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Political Science, International Relations
Keyword	conditionality IMF repression protest human rights International Monetary Fund
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Eric Reinhardt, Emory University
Committee Members	Alexander Bolton, Emory University David Davis, Emory University

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