Does Naming and Shaming Improve Women’s Rights?

• In Event: Gender, Sexuality, and Human Rights

Abstract

To what extent does naming and shaming influence women’s rights in target countries? While many Western countries and international human rights organizations embrace shaming as a strategy to promote women’s rights, prior empirical work on the effects of naming and shaming has shown mixed results. In this article, we take a new approach to examine how naming and shaming influence women’s rights across regime types. First, we use automatic text analysis on a corpus of human rights reports published by Amnesty International (AI) and the U.S. government to develop a novel cross-national measure of women’s rights shaming. Second, we examine the construct validity of this measure, showing that it has high performance and convergent validity. Third, we empirically explore the association between shaming and women’s political empowerment across different regimes. Our results show that shaming seems to improve women’s rights in autocracies more than in democracies. Further analysis of autocracies indicates that personalist regimes are more likely to improve women’s rights as opposed to other autocracies Our measures and results contribute to the growing literature on women’s rights, human rights, international organizations, foreign policy, and authoritarian regimes.

Authors

• Yuan Zhou, Kobe University

• Charles David Crabtree, Dartmouth College

• Ghashia Kiyani, Naval Postgraduate School