Ruofan Ma, "International Monitoring and Labor Rights: Third Party Participation Deepens Compliance"
Issuing monitoring reports is a key mechanism through which international organizations provide information to facilitate compliance. Yet, there is great variation in whether such monitoring leads to compliance. This paper argues that a critical design feature that determines this effectiveness is its accessibility to third parties. These actors provide information that allows international organizations to verify states' self-claims of compliance and give more tailored advice on resolving noncompliance. Consequently, reporting processes that allow third-party participation are more likely to affect deeper compliance. To test this argument, I adopt a mixed-method approach under the institutional context of the International Labor Organization (ILO). The ILO sets a wide range of labor standards and adopts various reporting mechanisms to monitor member states' compliance with labor rights. I compare two reporting mechanisms employed by the ILO. I collect 177 member states' convention ratification records and ILO's reports regarding their collective labor rights compliance between 1985–2012. ILO reports significantly improve the institutional compliance of the member states with labor standards. Moreover, reports that involve third-party participation further improve states' behavioral compliance. Then, using two case studies on Cambodia and China, I provide evidence that the deepening of compliance follows from the dynamic monitoring in the report-compilation process, in which the ILO uses the reported information to engage international audiences and leverage compliance.
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel room K354 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20251111T170000Z DTEND:20251111T190000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR