Social Influence and Human Rights Policy Change

• In Event: International Cooperation and Resistance in Human Rights Promotion Campaigns

Abstract

Human rights violations are still a widespread phenomenon that affects the lives of hundreds of millions of people. All around the world, there are victims of forced labor, discrimination, or forced childhood marriage. After the adoption of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and since the 1970s, the transnational human rights movement has grown and achieved many victories in promoting human rights globally. Despite this, the literature on norms diffusion and on naming and shaming has produced contradictory results. Furthermore, little scholarly attention has been paid to state-to-state pressure to protect human rights. This project aims at filling these gaps by investigating the role of social pressure in generating policy change on three rights: human trafficking, child marriage, and LGBT discrimination. In this paper, I propose a theory of social influence that theorizes how a target reacts to pressure from other governments and whether the effects of social pressure are homogeneous across rights.

Author

• Gino Pauselli, University of Pennsylvania