Learning some respect: Foreign events & the international diffusion of human rights practices

What do leaders learn from the experiences of other governments? How does this learning affect their respect for human rights and the international diffusion of human rights practices? This work posits that leaders learn valuable information about threats to their political positions, as well as the costs and benefits of using repression to deal with those threats, by observing events that take place in relevant foreign states. In particular, I argue that, in order for a foreign event to affect domestic human rights practices, the event must seem (1) highly desirable or highly undesirable from the perspective of political survival and (2) likely to occur in the observer's own state because the two states are similar in attributes associated with the observed event.;I apply this theory to three event-types: civil conflicts, economic sanctions, and public shaming by international non-governmental human rights organizations (HROs). Foreign civil conflicts are predicted to provide observing leaders with information about their own level of threat, particularly when the observing leader's state shares a strong ethnic linkage to a foreign ethnic conflict or when a non-ethnic conflict directly borders the observing leader's state. On the other hand, economic sanction activity aimed at another state's poor human rights practices is predicted to increase the perceived cost of repression for observing leaders, particularly when the target state has similar human rights practices and foreign policy commitments to those of the observer's state. Similarly, HRO shaming of foreign governments' human rights practices is also predicted to increase the perceived cost of repression for observing leaders, particularly when the shamed state has similar human rights practices and is located nearby.;These claims are evaluated using spatial econometric techniques for both measuring state relevance and accounting for spatial autocorrelation in human rights outcomes. The findings largely support the theory as presented. As such, this work represents one of the first studies to theorize about the causes of human rights diffusion and directly test the hypothesized mechanism using cross-national data. The patterns discovered and discussed will likely be of great interest to scholars, activists, and policy-makers alike.