Global Governance and Labor Rights

Abstract

How do global governance institutions shape state behavior when they cannot coerce compliance? This dissertation takes up that question through the international labor regime, where the International Labour Organization (ILO) and its overlapping forums monitor state commitments without enforcement powers. I examine three connected questions across three papers: (i) what kinds of monitoring deepen compliance, (ii) how exposure to overlapping monitoring regimes reshapes diplomatic behavior, and (iii) how shared multilateral labor standards shape the design of bilateral labor agreements, including the role they assign to non-state actors. My argument has two parts. First, monitoring is a design choice---which actors provide and receive information, which audiences are exposed, and how findings travel beyond the issuing institution. Second, these design choices shape state behavior on two fronts: domestic labor practice, and the wider network of international agreements states enter into. The first paper, "International Monitoring and Labor Rights,'' argues that the effectiveness of IO monitoring hinges on whether the reporting process includes third parties. Domestic interest groups, NGOs, and international observers push IOs to verify states' self-claimed compliance and to issue more tailored guidance on remedying violations. I test this argument using a mixed-method design at the ILO, comparing two of its reporting mechanisms. Drawing on 177 member states' convention ratification records and ILO reports between 1985 and 2012, I find that ILO reports produce substantively meaningful improvements in states' institutional compliance, and that reports incorporating third-party participation further improve behavioral compliance. Case studies on Cambodia and China corroborate these findings, showing how the ILO uses the dynamic monitoring built into the report-compilation process to engage international audiences and leverage compliance. The second paper, "Adaptation across International Organizations,'' coauthored with Averell Schmidt, asks how regime complexity changes diplomatic behavior. We argue that when diplomats anticipate scrutiny in one international forum, they shift their rhetoric in another to preempt criticism. This is strategic anticipation, distinct from learning or socialization. To test the argument, we exploit a natural experiment: states undergo Universal Periodic Review at the UN Human Rights Council once every four years, with timing set by lottery, while their delegates also convene annually at the International Labour Conference. Both events are held at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, and many delegates represent their states at both forums. Leveraging the names of more than 37,000 delegates, we show that government delegates use human rights language more in ILC debates before their UPR and emphasize human rights less often once review has passed---a pattern that runs against socialization accounts and that is driven by the exposure of individual diplomats to the UPR. The third paper, "Multilateral Standards, Bilateral Agreements,'' asks why some bilateral labor agreements (BLAs) bring in non-state actors as monitors while others do not. BLAs have proliferated since 2000 even as other forms of international economic cooperation have contracted, but they vary widely in the role they assign to international organizations, labor unions, and NGOs. I argue that cooperation in multilateral forums such as the ILO generates pressure for convergence, which encourages additional treaty-making and lowers the cost of opening those treaties to non-state monitors. Drawing on a dyad-year panel covering 1990 to 2020 and a two-stage inverse-probability weighted model, I find that each additional jointly ratified ILO convention raises the probability of BLA formation, more than tripling it as shared ratifications move from the minimum to maximum value. Conditional on formation, co-ratification also raises the probability that the resulting agreement designates monitoring roles for international organizations, labor unions, or NGOs, from roughly two percent to fourteen percent. The dissertation makes three contributions to the literature on international institutions. First, it moves the debate over IO effectiveness past whether monitoring matters and toward explaining which features of monitoring design generate behavioral change. Second, it offers a microfoundation for how regime complexity operates at the level of individual diplomats, showing that overlapping monitoring forums can produce strategic anticipation rather than the diffusion or socialization typically attributed to institutional density. Third, it bridges the multilateral and bilateral tracks of international cooperation by showing that shared multilateral standards alter the political economy of bilateral treaty-making, including states' willingness to open their commitments to non-state monitors. Across the three papers, my central argument is that monitoring is a design choice that shapes whether international institutions can move states from rhetorical to substantive compliance.