Differentiated Decoupling and Human Rights

Social Problems Advance Access published September 19, 2016 Social Problems, 2016, 0, 1–14 doi: 10.1093/socpro/spw020 Article Differentiated Decoupling and Human Rights Nitza Berkovitch and Neve Gordon Ben-Gurion University of the Negev One of the major issues attracting the attention of scholars studying global norm regimes, especially the human rights regime, is their impact on domestic settings. Borrowing from organizational studies, some of these scholars have used the term decoupling to conceptualize the widespread phenomenon of states that sign conventions but do not implement these conventions’ norms. In this article, we introduce the concept of differentiated decoupling, arguing that the implementation of human rights norms needs to be rethought and reoperationalized. We present a case study—the right to vote in the United States—to illustrate our argument that it is vital to disaggregate the decoupling processes and examine the different social groups within the state rather than limit scrutiny to the state level. We further contend that in order to explain differentiated decoupling, perspectives developed and used by sociologists who study inequality need to be adopted. In this way, scholars can capture the unequal distribution of human rights in domestic settings and begin to untangle the forces leading to differentiated decoupling. An analysis of differentiated decoupling helps reveal that “more human rights” sometimes means more human rights to one group and less to another, suggesting that implementation of human rights norms may even deepen stratification. K E Y W O R D S : human rights; decoupling; implementation; sociology of inequality; the right to vote. One of the major issues attracting the attention of scholars studying global norm regimes, especially the human rights regime, is their impact on domestic settings. For several decades scholars have been examining when, why, and how international norms and ideas shape state behavior and whether the development and entrenchment of a transnational human rights regime also increases the degree of state compliance with the regime’s norms. Examining the gaps between a state’s explicit commitment to human rights principles and the actual adoption and implementation of human rights norms, researchers have analyzed under what conditions states are more likely to abide by their international commitments. Borrowing from organizational studies (Meyer and Rowan 1977), some of these scholars have used the concept decoupling to conceptualize the widespread phenomenon of states that sign conventions but do not comply by these conventions’ norms. In this article, we aim to The authors acknowledge equal contribution and wish to thank the anonymous reviewers as well as Catherine Rottenberg for her comments and suggestions. Direct correspondence to: Neve Gordon, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, POB 653, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel. E-mail: ngordon@bgu.ac.il. C The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. V All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com  1 Downloaded from http://socpro.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on September 19, 2016 ABSTRACT 2  Berkovitch and Gordon 1 There is a large body of literature that deals with differential enforcement of laws according to race and ethnicity (Crenshaw 1991; Rojek, Rosenfeld, and Decker 2012; Romero 2006), gender (Belknap 2014), citizenship status (Bosworth and Kaufman 2011), disability status (Leone et al. 1995), as well as by the intersection of a number as social hierarchies such as citizenship status and gender (Salcido and Menjıvar 2012). In the human rights literature, however, this kind of differentiation is glossed over. Downloaded from http://socpro.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on September 19, 2016 problematize the concept decoupling, arguing that implementation of human rights norms needs to be rethought and reoperationalized. Both quantitative and qualitative studies examining the adoption and institutionalization of human rights norms within the local sphere tend to use the state as the central unit of analysis. These studies implicitly assume that the processes of decoupling are uniform and therefore state practices—protecting or violating human rights—are even and consistent across the population. In reality, however, human rights are never distributed evenly among the members of any given society. Hence, we maintain that it is vital to disaggregate the decoupling processes and examine the different social groups within the state rather than limit scrutiny to the state level. In this way, scholars can capture the uneven distribution of human rights in domestic settings and begin to untangle the forces leading to what we call the differentiated decoupling of human rights norms. By differentiated decoupling we mean practices of differentiation within the state, whereby human rights standards may be tightly coupled with practices vis-a-vis some groups within a given society but decoupled or even "radically decoupled" (Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui 2005) with respect to other groups. Hence, building on recent attempts to introduce the notion of differentiation into international relations theory and transnational processes (Buzan and Albert 2010; see also Albert and Buzan 2013; Kessler 2012), we adopt a particular conception of differentiation akin to Niklas Luhmann’s (1982) stratificatory differentiation, which denotes a situation whereby different social groups occupy different positions in a hierarchical social order. Yet for us stratification is not a stage in the evolution of social systems, but rather an integral part of every society. And it is precisely for this reason that we invoke differentiated decoupling, using it to study the heterogeneous impact of transnational processes in domestic settings. In the following pages we argue that processes of differentiated decoupling need to be incorporated into the study of human rights. Our argument has two intricately related dimensions: descriptive and explanatory. Descriptively, additional effort needs to be invested in thinking how to capture phenomena that have not previously been described by studies examining human rights implementation. It is, we maintain, vital to change the lens through which compliance is measured (from the state to groups within it), since this will help reveal the lack of adherence to the most basic principle underlying human rights: namely, universality. The majority of existing research does not detect and, indeed, conceals the uneven distribution of human rights across a country’s population due to the kind of data it uses (and is currently accessible) and the unit of analysis. The only exceptions are studies examining the implementation of human rights conventions that pertain to a certain group, such as women or children (Hill 2010; Von Stein 2008). These studies, we believe, are a good starting point for understanding differentiated decoupling, but if one wants to capture the different degrees of decoupling it is also important to examine the intersectional axes of oppression.1 Second, we contend that in order to explain differentiated decoupling, perspectives developed and used by sociologists who study inequality need to be adopted. We accordingly join the growing scholarship that brings sociological perspectives to the study of human rights (Deflem and Chicoine 2011; Levy and Sznaider 2006; Sjoberg, Gill, and Williams 2001; Somers and Roberts 2008; Turner 1993), particularly studies examining the spread, adoption, and implementation of human rights in domestic arenas (see review in Hafner-Burton and Ron 2009). Yet, still missing from this body of literature are the essential insights of the sociology of inequality. By the sociology of inequality we do not mean a specific method or perspective, but rather the wide scholarship dealing with practices, processes, structures, and ideologies that shape and change patterns of inequality among social groups and individuals (Acker 2006; Neckerman and Torche 2007). These Differentiated Decoupling and Human Rights  3 THE HUMAN RIGHTS REGIME’S IMPACT A considerable body of literature has emerged exploring the human rights regime’s impact on state practices. Intrigued by the immense variation in implementation of human rights norms among Downloaded from http://socpro.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on September 19, 2016 include, inter alia, studies dealing with the significance and complexity of intersectionality (McCall 2005) or the impact of space on producing inequality (Tickamyer 2000). Currently, the human rights literature does not engage with this scholarship. Many of the studies aiming to identify the dynamics affecting state compliance with human rights norms examine the impact of various domestic characteristics that mediate external normative pressures. These characteristics include, inter alia, the type of political regime (Simmons 2009), the strength and independence of the judiciary system (Smith-Cannoy 2012), and the existence of human rights social movements and organizations (see review in Tsutsui, Whitlinger, and Lim 2012). We suggest that the encounter between a state’s human rights practices and the existing social structures and power relations accounts for the way decoupling takes place “on the ground” and for the way implementation is experienced by individuals from different social groups. The goal, in sum, is to zoom in on the local political and social landscape so as to identify varying degrees of implementation among the different social groups comprising a population (rather than assuming that the population is a homogenous entity). Heterogeneous outcomes are, we maintain, often the result of differentiated decoupling, whereby a human rights norm regime may be coupled with practices vis-a-vis a group that is situated high in the social hierarchy and decoupled to varying degrees with respect to other groups. Insofar as this is the case, then the implementation of human rights often reflects and reproduces rather than mitigates hierarchical social structures. Consequently, more implementation of human rights norms does not necessarily produce more liberation, as is often assumed in the human rights literature, and may even end up deepening existing social stratification by securing specific rights to already privileged groups and not to others. The right to vote, a basic human right, which we will be examining in this article, was initially bestowed only upon white males, thus increasing the ability of a specific group of men to influence the political decision-making process (i.e., offering them more freedoms). Simultaneously, however, the fact that women and people of color were not granted the right to vote extended and fortified the existing inequality between white men and these groups, and actually deepened hierarchical social structures. Along similar lines, studies have shown that certain rights fought for and acquired by the 1970s women’s movement helped advance the liberation of white women but at the same time widened the gap between these women and women of color (Davis 2011; Hooks 2000). Gesturing towards this phenomenon also enables us to point to a connection between two bodies of literature that so far have not been in dialogue: the implementation literature and the governmentality literature, which examines how human rights can be deployed by states to manage the conduct of populations and individuals (Brown 2004; Douzinas 2007; Perugini and Gordon 2015). By underscoring the phenomenon of differentiated decoupling, we also hope to intervene in the extensive body of research examining how groups are exposed differently to global processes in general and to global norms in particular. Considering that each global process involves different dynamics, our article contributes to this literature by showing how different groups are influenced in different ways following the diffusion of human rights norms into the local sphere. In what follows, we provide a brief overview of the literature dealing with the implementation and decoupling of human rights norms, while maintaining that the analysis of how domestic structures and power relations impact decoupling has been limited. Next, we explain the notion of differentiated decoupling, arguing that the widespread assumption that processes can be explained using either the binary coupling/decoupling or a conception of decoupling that is applied in a uniform manner across the population is misguided since decoupling is almost always differentiated. We then provide a case study involving the right to vote in the United States to illustrate different levels of decoupling based on race, gender, and space. By way of conclusion, we discuss the implications of the argument. 4  Berkovitch and Gordon 2 Freedom House data on civil and political rights uses a scale of one to five. The Cingranelli and Richards Index (CIRI) creates a nine-point physical integrity index and the Political Terror Scale (PTS) is collected from annual U.S. Department of State and Amnesty International country reports. Downloaded from http://socpro.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on September 19, 2016 states, scholars have embarked on comparative cross-national and longitudinal research projects that aim to identify the factors accounting for these differences (e.g., Henderson 1991; Mitchell and McCormick 1988; Poe, Carey, and Vazquez 2001; Poe, Tate, and Keith 1999). Most studies have focused on political rights, using data sets that survey the protection of rights relating to the physical integrity of the body (e.g., PTS and CIRI)—such as torture, political imprisonment, extrajudicial executions—while others use indices that monitor freedom of expression and association (e.g., Freedom House).2 Even though some studies found that ratification of human rights conventions had positive effects on implementation (Simmons 2009), others found no effect at all (Keith 1999), and still others found that ratification may even have a negative impact on human rights practices (Hill 2010). Findings suggest that there are high levels of decoupling among authoritarian regimes and/or among countries with high levels of poverty (Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui 2005; Henderson 1991; Mitchell and McCormick 1988; Neumayer 2005; Poe and Tate 1994). Still other studies have identified specific conditions that are needed so that democratic institutions have an effect following the ratification of a convention, such as when evidence of a violation is relatively easy and inexpensive to present (Lupu 2013) or when a country demonstrates a higher level of commitment towards human rights by creating mechanisms that encourage individuals to file complaints against abuses (e.g., by signing also the optional protocol [Cole 2012]). In addition, a series of studies point to the importance of strong and independent judicial systems in ensuring norm compliance (Smith-Cannoy 2012; Von Stein 2008). The cumulative results of quantitative studies examining whether there is a link among political regime type, ratification, and implementation are, nonetheless, inconclusive and do not reveal a clear pattern of either coupling or decoupling between ratification and implementation. Qualitative case studies are part of another vast corpus of human rights literature. This corpus uses qualitative methodology to examine local factors impacting the implementation of pro-rights legislation, policies, and practices within the state. Focusing on either a single country or a number of countries, these studies show how human rights social movements, activists, and experts expose, document, and publicize information about abuses, engage in advocacy, create coalitions, run local and global media campaigns, and mobilize transnational human rights networks that increase the political costs of human rights abuses and consequently bring about a change in state practices (Clark 1995; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Klotz 2002; Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999; Ron 1997; Thomas 2001). The findings of qualitative studies often suggest that human rights can have a substantial impact on social change (Hafner-Burton and Ron 2009). Moreover, the majority of these studies indicate that democracies with robust democratic institutions as well as countries in the midst of a democratization process do improve their human rights practices following ratification of the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), and, at times, other conventions as well (but note the non-linear effect found in Davenport and Armstrong 2004). In sum, cross-national studies examine human rights implementation in relation to the country’s population (or a cross-national group like women), which is considered as a single unit. Emily Hafner-Burton and James Ron (2009) have shown that these studies often do not capture substantial differences among countries or changes within a given country over time. While this line of criticism is persuasive, we would like to stress that the underlying assumption when using an aggregated level of measurement is that the violation occurs in a homogeneous pattern across the whole population, or alternatively, that an improvement in state practices applies equally to all social groups. Along similar lines, and somewhat surprisingly, most qualitative studies, such as case studies working with the spiral model (Risse et al. 1999) do not examine the divergences of implementation within a country. Differentiated Decoupling and Human Rights  5 In both the quantitative and qualitative literature the country is the unit of analysis and with few exceptions mostly coming from anthropology (Goodale 2008; Goodale and Merry 2007; Merry et al. 2010) its population is conceived as a homogenous entity. Downloaded from http://socpro.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on September 19, 2016 DECOUPLING AND HUMAN RIGHTS RESEARCH The concept of decoupling was initially used in organization research, where neo-institutionalist researchers pointed at the phenomenon in which organizations, when pressured by their institutional environment, adopt policies only ritualistically without actually changing their practices (Meyer and Rowan 1977; for an elaborate theoretization and empirical review see Buhari-Gulmez 2010; Powell and Dimaggio 1991; Zucker 1987). The ceremonial adoption of a policy is accordingly understood as an act aimed at garnering legitimacy rather than at bringing about organizational change. While recently researchers have observed that decoupling occurs also as an organizational response to contradictory environmental pressures yielded by a plurality of fields (Boxenbaum and Jonsson 2008; Greenwood et al. 2011), it is the earlier conceptualization of decoupling that focused on the need for legitimacy that has “travelled” to the field of human rights studies. Researchers found this concept useful for pointing at the gap between states’ expressed commitment to human rights principles, in the form of ratification of human rights treaties, and the actual adoption and implementation of human rights norms. Ratification, they have shown, does not predict change in a state’s human rights practices and, at times, even increases the levels of abuse, a phenomenon dubbed by Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui (2005) as “radical decoupling.” Much research effort has been devoted to identifying the conditions under which decoupling is more likely to occur. For example, decoupling can be affected by the properties of the treaties themselves. Wade Cole (2012) found that treaties with stronger monitoring provisions (that allow for filing of individual petitions) lead to tighter coupling between policy and actual state practices (i.e., higher levels of compliance). Attributes of the states were found to matter as well, whereby the more autonomous a repressive state is, the more likely it is “to entertain high levels of decoupling between policy and practice” (Hafner-Burton, Tsutsui, and Meyer 2008:115). In a recent article, Cole and Francisco Ramirez (2013) called for a fundamental rethinking of decoupling. Instead of understanding commitment to human rights norms as a static window dressing done for the mere sake of legitimation, they suggest that decoupling is a dynamic process that is being shaped and reshaped by the global institutional environment that privileges some human rights over others (i.e., being consensual or contested). Also interesting are recent developments in organizations studies where researchers identify “multiple decoupling” (Bromley, Hwang, and Powell 2013) as well as the decoupling between ends and means rather as between policy and practices (Bromley and Powell 2012). Within this literature the degree of decoupling may vary, but the particular degree itself is always presented as uniform in relation to society as a whole. Even when considering a changing degree of human rights compliance over time, the question involves the overall extent of decoupling, measured at the state level. For instance, on an index of one to seven, measuring compliance of states that ratified human rights conventions, a state can move from seven (radical decoupling) to four (decoupling), but at a given historical moment the degree of decoupling is considered constant. We, by contrast, suggest that decoupling itself is always differentiated and argue that in a given state at a particular historical moment human rights standards may be tightly coupled with practices vis-a-vis some groups but loosely coupled or even “radically decoupled” with respect to other groups. In this sense, we follow Georg Krücken and Gili Drori (2009) who maintain that there is a need to consider the differential development of loose coupling in particular contexts as a way of analyzing how actors negotiate and reconcile conflicting normative pressures. To be sure, our argument is tied to the critique of “methodological nationalism” (Bartelson 2001; Beck 2002; Beck and Sznaider 2006) in the sense that implementation needs, in our view, to be examined in relation to different groups and not merely to a state’s whole population, as if it were a 6  Berkovitch and Gordon homogenous unit. Nonetheless, we continue to use the state as the central unit since we compare the distribution of implementation of human rights norms among groups within the state. This is actually the standard approach in the sociology of inequality, an approach that has not been adopted in the research examining human rights compliance. POLITICAL RIGHTS IN THE UNITED STATES The case study examines the implementation of the right to vote in the United States. We focus on the United States since it is considered a democracy that respects political rights, not least of which is the right to vote. We chose this particular right since we wanted to show that decoupling is differentiated also in cases when the right is not considered controversial and has been internalized and institutionalized. Also, as a result of its high level of institutionalization and due to the fact that it preceded the global human rights regime, at least in the case of the United States, the public and many researchers do not consider it part of this global regime (with the exception of organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP]). This basic political right appears in Article 25 of the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Right (ICCPR), which states, “Every citizen shall have the right and the opportunity . . . to vote and to be elected at genuine periodic elections which shall be by universal . . . ” The United States signed ICCPR in 1977 and ratified it in 1992 with five reservations, none of which pertain to Article 25. Hence, according to the United States voting is a basic human right. The 1992 ratification marked the adoption of a global human rights norm in the protracted struggle for universal enfranchisement—primarily for women and African Americans—in the United States (Keyssar 2009). While we cannot discuss this struggle at any length, suffice it to say that this history is informed by pressure to extend the vote to disenfranchised populations and the deployment of different decoupling strategies to deflect the outcome of these pressures. So if the Fifteenth Downloaded from http://socpro.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on September 19, 2016 DIFFERENTIATED DECOUPLING We consequently argue that in order to better understand decoupling processes it is crucial to examine the implementation of human rights norms on different groups comprising society. Examining state violence, James Ron, in 1997, emphasized that differences in geographic location, ethnicity, social class, degree of incorporation into the state, and religion have significant implications for the type of treatment populations experience during periods of acute state violence. “To the extent that populations targeted by democratic states are ‘socially distanced’ or politically cut off from the government in question, they,” according to Ron (1997), “do not seem to benefit from the safeguards available to other citizens” (p. 290). We embrace this insight, but propose that it holds true to practically all forms of human rights violations in practically all circumstances and not only in the various instances and modes of state violence: it is not only pertinent to physical integrity of the body but to the full inventory of human rights; it is not limited to the distribution of violations perpetrated by state actors, but also includes non-state actors; and it does not merely occur during extraordinary periods, but is part of ordinary everyday life. Indeed, it is safe to assume that differentiated decoupling of human rights norms is the norm. Moreover, we propose that in order to explain differentiated decoupling it is vital to take into account an array of forces and factors that have not been considered by the human rights literature, such as locally embedded institutionalized racism and/or sexism, ethnonationalism, neoliberalism, and forms of patriarchy. In the following section, we provide a case study dealing with the right to vote in the United States to demonstrate how an examination of differentiated decoupling can change the way we perceive human rights implementation in domestic settings and how methods developed by sociologists studying inequality can be useful when examining decoupling. This case study serves to underscore the importance of transcending the notion that decoupling takes place in a uniform manner. Differentiated Decoupling and Human Rights  7 3 Civil liberties allow for the freedoms of expression and belief, associational and organizational rights, rule of law, and personal autonomy without interference from the state (Freedom House 2013). Downloaded from http://socpro.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on September 19, 2016 Amendment (1870) declared that the “right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” the Jim Crow Laws can be seen as a form of decoupling practiced primarily by states in the South in order to negotiate conflicting normative pressures. In addition to the literacy tests, property tests, and grandfather clauses, felons and ex-felons were also not allowed to vote in many states. These legal barriers were passed in the late 1860s and 1870s as a way of negotiating conflicting normative pressures, and were used as a decoupling strategy. Following the mobilization of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, new federal legislation prohibited racial discrimination in voting (the Voter Rights Act of 1965), thus annulling most of the legal barriers prohibiting African Americans from voting (Keyssar 2009). Among the few remaining restrictions on the right to vote, state laws banning felons and ex-felons from voting stand out as a decoupling strategy that continues to exist. This ban, like all liberal laws, is presented as neutral, but within a context of institutionalized racism whereby African American imprisonment rates have consistently exceeded white rates since at least the Civil War era (Behrens, Uggen, and Manza 2003), a sharp discrepancy in disenfranchisement between African Americans and whites is produced. It is important to stress that the disenfranchisement of felons and ex-felons is uncommon. Most European states do not have automatic disenfranchisements rules for prisoners and ex-felons and consider such a practice to be an egregious violation of human rights. Except for the United States, practically no democratic country has a general rule disenfranchising ex-felons. Thus, among democracies enfranchisement of felons and ex-felons is almost universal. It is within this context that we examine The Freedom in the World Survey, an index published each year by Freedom House, which aims to provide “an annual evaluation of the state of global freedom as experienced by individuals.” This survey includes both analytical reports and numerical ratings— on a scale of one to sevem—whereby a rating of one indicates the highest degree of freedom and seven the lowest. Quantitative cross-national studies and qualitative case studies examining human rights norms and their implementation at times draw upon this index (Baughn and McIntosh 2007; Rowley and Smith 2009) as well as on other similar data sets. These studies often have important insights, but a brief analysis of the right to vote in the United States underscores the value of closely examining the decoupling process, since as the sociological literature on incarceration shows three factors—race, gender, and space—have a profound impact on the implementation of this right. The Freedom House survey measures freedom according to two broad categories: political rights and civil liberties. It defines political rights as those rights that “enable people to participate freely in the political process, including the right to vote freely for distinct alternatives in legitimate elections . . . ”3 The organization accentuates that it is interested in “the real-world rights and freedoms enjoyed by individuals,” and while it considers “the presence of legal rights, it places a greater emphasis on whether these rights are implemented in practice” (Freedom House 2013). Hence, according to its self-portrayal, Freedom House measures the way individuals actually enjoy political rights, including the right to vote freely. In the 2013 survey, the United States received ratings of one for both political rights and civil liberties (Freedom House 2013). In the 2012 analytical report, Freedom House points out that the “criminal justice system’s treatment of minority groups has long been a problem” in the United States and that minority groups “account for an outsized share of the prison population” (Freedom House 2012). Though highly critical of numerous social wrongs in the United States, the Freedom House fails in its descriptive report to draw the link between the levels of incarceration in the United States, the share of minorities among the prisoner and ex-prisoner population, and the basic right to vote. This despite the fact the numerous studies have shown how in several states large proportions of African Americans are disenfranchised due to laws that prohibit political participation of felons and 8  Berkovitch and Gordon Downloaded from http://socpro.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on September 19, 2016 ex-felons (Karlan 2004; Manza and Uggen 2006; Pettit and Western 2004; Uggen, 2000; Uggen and Manza 2002; Wakefield and Uggen 2010). In 2010, an estimated 5.85 million people in the United States—2.5 percent of the nation’s voting age population—could not vote due to a current or previous felony conviction. That is, 1 of every 40 adults (Uggen et al. 2012). This seems to be a relatively low percentage of disenfranchised citizens, and therefore one might still infer that in the United States voting is coupled with international human rights norms and concur with the rating provided by Freedom House. However, if one zooms in a different picture emerges. Christopher Uggen and colleagues (2012) have shown that the percentage of African Americans who could not vote due to a felony conviction was three times greater than the rate among the general population and four times greater than whites, reaching an estimated 7.7 percent of all African Americans in 2010. If one examines the gendered dimension and isolates African American men from the voting age population in the United States, then more than one from every eight is ineligible to vote. Hence, by disaggregating the population into racial and gender groups one notices that within one group over 12 percent are disenfranchised, as opposed to the 2.5 percent of the general population. A further level of disaggregation, this time according to states, reveals that the distribution of disenfranchisement among African Americans is even more uneven. Rates of disenfranchisement vary dramatically by state due to broad variations in voting prohibitions. Forty-five percent of the entire disenfranchised population totaling over 2.6 million people live in 11 states that continue disenfranchising people after they have completed their sentences. In three states, over 20 percent of African Americans are disenfranchised, with Florida at the helm (23.32 percent), followed by Kentucky (22.34 percent) and Virginia (20.37 percent), while in six additional states the percentage of disenfranchised African Americans is in the teens (Uggen et al. 2012). This highlights that the Freedom House index, which monitors the “real-world rights and freedoms enjoyed by individuals,” does not capture the heterogonous implementation of human rights norms as well as the differentiation in the decoupling strategies of the normative injunction of universal suffrage. Once we zoom in from the country level to the states and racial and gender groups, then it becomes apparent that decoupling is a differentiated strategy and that any viable explanation must consider the impact of societal forces that mediate and shape the pattern of implementation of human rights norms. In the case of disenfranchisement of felons and ex-felons in the United States, then the diverse state disenfranchisement laws can be conceptualized as differentiated forms of decoupling. Currently, in 2 states there are no restrictions on voting and this could be understood as coupling; in 13 states only inmates cannot vote which is one form of decoupling; in 5 states inmates and parolees are disenfranchised, which constitutes a slightly more pronounced form of decoupling; in 19 states even more pronounced decoupling is taking place because inmates, parolees, and probationers cannot vote; and in 11 states inmates, parolees, probationers, and ex-felons cannot cast ballots in elections, which is in effect radical decoupling (Wakefield and Uggen 2010). One should note in this context that different groups such as the Sentencing Project and the NACCP have been pressuring state legislators to revoke laws that prohibit felons and ex-felons from voting. The outcomes are mixed (Procon.org 2014). Between 2000 and 2014, nine states (Alabama, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Maryland, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, and Virginia) changed their laws so as to increase some degree of enfranchisement to felons or ex-felons, but the changes in two of these states were later repealed (Iowa and Florida), while two other states legislated bills increasing disenfranchisement (South Dakota and Massachusetts) and Washington upheld existing disenfranchisement legislation. During the same period the U.S. Senate voted down an amendment granting felons the right to vote (2002). This prolific legislative activity underscores that conflicting normative pressures are being exerted both at the state and federal level to either undo or strengthen decoupling strategies. The encounter between state laws (rather than federal laws) that ban felons and ex-felons from voting (a decoupling strategy) and institutionalized racism explains the heterogeneity of outcomes. In order to understand the high rate of African American incarceration, which is the primary cause for Differentiated Decoupling and Human Rights  9 Downloaded from http://socpro.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on September 19, 2016 the racial heterogeneity of disenfranchisement, a variety of factors need to be considered, including different patterns of sentencing of ethnic groups (Steffensmeier, Ulmer, and Kramer 1998; Steffensmeier and Demuth 2000), the intersection of race and low education attainment and its impact on incarceration (Pettit and Western 2004), as well as class inequality, which includes education and the intersection of race, low wages, and unemployment (Western, Kling, and Weiman 2001). Also pertinent to African American incarceration is the effect of neighborhood characteristics and spatial contagion on recidivism (Stahler et al. 2013) as well as the relation between family structures (single parenthood) and incarceration (Western, Lopoo, and McLanahan 2004; Western and Wildeman 2009). All of which comes to underscore three points. First, most cross-national data sets and indices are not structured to help us capture differentiated decoupling because they conceal the heterogeneity of implementation. Freedom House’s form of data gathering probably takes into account that 2.5 percent of citizens in the United States are disenfranchised, but it does not capture the significant phenomenon that over 12 percent of African American men in the United States are disenfranchised and 23 percent of African Americans cannot vote in Florida. Consequently, it helps conceal key information about “the right to vote freely” in the United States, a right which it purports to measure (Freedom House 2013). Crucially, when the varying outcomes are concealed then the processes that produce them are also covered up and over. One outlier is the Minorities at Risk database (Gurr 1995), which provides data on human rights violations such as political and economic discrimination for different racial and ethnic groups within countries. However, the limitation of this database has already been noted, especially when used for purposes other than the ones for which it was designed (mainly to investigate the relation between discrimination and political mobilization) and when moving from the group as the central unit of analysis to the country (Hug 2013). Still, this is the first step in the right direction. Second, in order to understand the forces shaping the uneven distribution of rights in local settings, new kinds of explanations need to be adopted. In this case, for example, it appears that differentiated decoupling is due, at least in part, to the encounter between seemingly neutral laws and institutionalized racism. State laws pertaining to voting prohibitions of felons and ex-felons are for the most part in southern states and as we noted earlier are part of the institutionalization of racism since they are linked historically to efforts to hinder African Americans from taking part in the political process (Keyssar 2009). The southern states—where there is a high level of African American disenfranchisement—accept the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and none of them entertain challenging it straight on. So there is actually a ceremonial adoption of the universal right to vote. The felon and ex-felon laws are used as a decoupling strategy between the normative injunctions promulgated by the federal government and the global arena and the actual practices and normative position of the southern states. Hence, in order to better understand why the rate of African American incarceration is so high forms of assessment deployed in the sociological literature on inequality are vital and have to be included in the research design of the qualitative literature on the implementation of human rights. Finally, identifying and analyzing the differentiated decoupling of the right to vote by using insights from the sociology of inequality suggests that political rights are intricately tied and indeed dependent upon the protection of economic and social rights. The sociological analysis of why African Americans are disproportionately incarcerated and therefore relatively large percentages of this minority group are disenfranchised suggests that the lack of implementation of this political right (the type of right that is overwhelmingly examined in the implementation literature) is the lack of implementation of certain economic and social rights (the type of rights that tend not to be studied). This observation underscores the importance of intersectionality. 10  Berkovitch and Gordon 4 In Israel, for example, there are different decoupling mechanisms that lead to the differential implementation of human rights. One such mechanism is military service. For Jewish citizens military service is compulsory, while (generally speaking) Palestinian citizens do not serve in the military. Military service ultimately serves as a decoupling device, since those who do not serve do not enjoy the same rights as those who do (Yiftachel 2006). Another mechanism is the creation of parallel legal system, so that Jews and Palestinian citizens are governed by one legal system, and Palestinians from the West Bank are governed by another legal system that offers them much less rights (Gordon 2008). Despite the fact that this parallel system has been in place for the past 50 years, the 2015 Freedom House report gave Israel a high score of one in terms of political rights. Downloaded from http://socpro.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on September 19, 2016 CONCLUSION Like many others, we are also interested in whether the human rights regime actually “makes a difference” and when, why, and how countries adopt human rights norms and change their practices. We, however, are not merely interested in whether more people are free of the fear of being tortured and of being hungry or less people lack access to education once a state ratifies conventions and incorporates human rights norms into legislation and policies. Rather, we think it is also important to understand the effect of human rights “on the ground,” by examining how the processes of implementation impact groups differently and what factors account for the patterns of differentiated decoupling. We therefore propose that it is vital to zoom in so as to identify varying degrees of implementation among the different social groups comprising a country’s population, and then to try to understand the differentiated decoupling processes that led to the heterogeneity of implementation. To do so, the human rights implementation literature needs to borrow insights from the literature on social inequalities so as to rethink the effects of domestic social forces and internal power structures (at times combined with external) shaping processes of differentiated decoupling. Once the implementation of human rights is examined through a “disaggregate lens,” and the heterogeneity of implementation becomes manifest then it also becomes obvious that coupling and decoupling do not tend to extend across a population evenly. This underscores that an analysis of the structures and institutions encountered by the norm regime needs to be integrated into studies examining human rights implementation. “Bringing society in” and examining the “power of the local” will enable researchers to better understand the formation of differentiated decoupling of human rights norms. Once case studies analyzing processes of differentiated decoupling are amassed, scholars will be able to theorize what determines decoupling strategies to the human rights norm regime. We believe that our article offers a first and necessary step in this direction. Our case study dealt with a basic right that is the cornerstone of any democracy: the right to vote. Studies have shown that one-eighth of all African American men are disenfranchised and almost a quarter of African Americans cannot vote in Florida. A particular race, class, and gender system leading to a very high proportion of incarceration among African American men, combined with legislation (whose roots can to be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century) denying felons and ex-felons the right to vote, are the factors accounting for this unparalleled level of disenfranchisement among one particular group. We showed, in other words, how differentiated decoupling is produced by (at least) two different (but interconnected) processes: (1) the encounter between seemingly neutral laws and existing social inequalities, and (2) a decentralized system that allows for diverse laws in different regions. In other countries the second process might not exist or might operate through ordinances rather than laws, but such countries might also have other mechanisms that serve to differentiate the decoupling process.4 Our case study also suggests that the right to vote is dependent on the protection of economic and social rights, underscoring that implementation or lack thereof of one right might be contingent upon the implementation or lack thereof of another totally different kind of right. In some cases, researchers may find that implementation of a certain political right is lagging due to societal economic structures, while in other cases it might be due to ethnic or patriarchal structures, and often it might be an amalgamation of all three. 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