Beyond compliance: Comparative responses to international human rights pressure

This dissertation examines the relationship between international human rights pressure and state compliance. Why do states comply differently in the face of similar international norms and pressure? Existing approaches have not been able to address this puzzle because they have conceptualized compliance too narrowly and have assumed that state compliance is the product of international or domestic support for a norm. My contention is that the impact of pressures to comply with an international norm, however, depends on both the strength of pressures to violate the norm and the institutions that mediate conflicts over compliance.; Accordingly, the argument consists of two parts. First, state compliance is reconceptualized as a multidimensional variable, with both behavioral and symbolic components. Second, the role of two factors is introduced to explain variations in behavioral and symbolic compliance: the sources of norm violation and the structure of decision making. The argument joins insights from the literatures on state repression, the sociology of "accounts," and research on domestic institutions to complement existing approaches to state compliance.; I test the argument in two historical case studies, comparing Chile and Argentina during the 1970s, and a statistical study of 55 countries in the 1990s. Chile and Argentina, while subject to similar international pressure, varied critically in terms of the domestic variables analyzed. In the statistical study, I compare how well 'persuasion' and 'reform' models of compliance explain the two types of compliance. The principal finding is that pressures on behalf of international norms are related directly to symbolic but not behavioral forms of compliance.; The dissertation also probes the long-term implications of the argument for normative change. One chapter is therefore devoted to understanding the processes by which international norms can be internalized---via conflict or convergence---while examining human rights reform in Chile and Argentina under democratization. The dissertation concludes with both concrete policy recommendations for applying human rights pressure and broader theoretical implications for understanding international norms and state sovereignty. In contrast to conventional views in international relations and legal theory, state compliance is treated as the product of domestic conflict more than international cooperation.