The concept of audience costs originally derives from international bargaining models that try to assess the costs and risks to a state of either attacking or backing down during a crisis (see Fearon, 1994). In sending signals to the opponent by making a public announce-ment in international conflicts, leaders demonstrate their credibility to the outside world,
9See: General Recommendation No. 21 (13th session, 1994), Committee on the Elimination of Discrimi-nation Against Women.
URL: http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/recommendations/recomm.htm#recom21.
as non-compliance with their statement would have domestic consequences (Weeks, 2008).
If the leader does not keep his or her word, s/he risks domestic punishment, a mechanism most often attributed to democracies, rather than autocratic regimes.
The idea of audience costs as the costs a government has to face if it fails to keep to in-ternational communications can be applied to state compliance with inin-ternational human rights law. In ratifying CEDAW, a state not only communicates to other states that it will abide by the agreed standards, it also signals to the domestic arena that reform is going to take place. In turn, if a state fails to bring about the promised change, domestic groups can use the Convention as a powerful tool for advocating their interests (see Keck and Sikkink, 1998). Weeks (2008) distinguishes three factors that contribute to the onset of audience costs. First, the domestic audience needs to have the incentive, the capacity and the ability to coordinate a protest against government action or its failure to act. In terms of human rights performance, interest groups such as NGOs provide this platform.
This idea is confirmed by studies showing that states oppressing internal opposition have been found to fail in complying with the agreed standards significantly more often (see Hafner-Burton et al., 2008), which can be explained by the lack of audience costs that could be imposed on them for non-compliance.
Second, the visibility to outsiders of the internal sanctioning mechanisms is crucial to the effect of audience costs (see Weeks, 2008). To translate this into the case of hu-man rights compliance, it is the ability of domestic interest groups to communicate and network to the ‘outsiders’ the non-compliant behaviour of their government, in order to create the above-explained boomerang effect that increases the audience costs. Women’s rights activists have often claimed the international advocacy networks and their national counterparts to have been the decisive actors within the struggle for women’s equality. In-ternal protest that manages to be effectively projected to the international arena creates negative exposure for national governments that influences the decision-making process of complying with or defecting from an agreement.
Finally, in determining the possibility of audience costs, one has to ask whether the au-dience is actually in favour of state compliance. In the case of CEDAW, does the public actually want to end all discrimination against women? The status quo of inequality is most likely benefiting some part of the domestic population, which makes change all the more difficult (see Cook, 1994). As displayed above, the influence of religious traditions and beliefs plays an important role here. For audience costs to unfold their intended im-pact, interest groups that have the capacity to challenge the status quo have to be able to articulate their discontent with the non-compliant behaviour. I therefore expect two fac-tors to have a principal influence on the situation of womens rights, besides the ratification of CEDAW: First the existence of democratic domestic institutions will have a positive effect on the ability of interest groups to pressurise governments into respecting women’s
rights and thus have a positive effect on the overall situation. Second, the existence of strong traditional organisations, such as religious institutions will have a negative effect on women’s status, as these groups will influence governments to maintain the traditional role of women in society.
To summarise, how do these audience costs differ between women’s economic, social and political rights? If the costs of domestic pressure and sanctions are dependent on interests groups’ abilities to cooperate, formulate and pressurize their government with national and international help, they are likely to differ depending on the issue that is at stake.
Whereas the international movement for women’s suffrage is described as a global phe-nomenon that set out to abolish the most fundamental legal inequality of opportunity, other far-reaching discriminatory realities are harder to define and approach in such a holistic way. The basic motivation of the women’s suffrage movement was easy to iden-tify: the law forbade women to vote, thus the solution was simple, a legal change was all that was needed. As Keck and Sikkink put it: ‘The issue lent itself to framing and action that appealed to the most basic values of the liberal state - equality, liberty and democracy (1998: 53)’. Many of the basic socio-economic rights to date lack a concise formulation of their implicit duties (see Chapman, 2007; Apodaca, 1998, 2007) as well as an appropriate standing on the agenda of religious discourses, thus failing to make them universally acceptable, understandable and advocate-able.