Abstract
Why do states’ human rights records converge with co-members in intergovernmental organizations (IGOs)? This study provides new insights on whether interactions in IGOs have the capacity to genuinely transform state preferences or whether norm diffusion is a consequence of instrumental processes. We leverage information about the timing of human rights alignment to disentangle intrinsic from instrumental motives. We hypothesize that instrumental motives find expression in pre-membership alignment and reversions to original normative standards after IGO exits. Intrinsic motives lead to gradual alignment during IGO membership and result in stable normative changes beyond IGO exits. Using varying-slopes, varying intercepts models, we investigate the distance on human rights indices between individual states and IGO means. While we find evidence for systematic convergence during IGO membership, no significant changes occur before and after IGO membership. Testing alignment of different physical integrity rights, we find no evidence for instrumental shifts to clandestine repression during IGO membership. Overall, the results suggest that norm alignment in IGOs is at least not exclusively instrumentally motivated. Our findings support constructivist arguments on state interests and suggest that IGOs are capable of transforming states’ human rights related preferences.
Highlights
Constructivism has greatly enriched the scholarly understanding of political processes by emphasizing that state interests are no fixed entities but fundamentally shaped by the types of interactions that states are involved in (e.g., Klotz, 1995; Wendt, 1999)
(a) Beginning with the time prior to intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) membership, we argue that systematic norm convergence shortly before membership is indicative of instrumental motives
We present the results in the following order: first, we show the results of our analysis modelling human rights alignment during IGO membership
Summary
Constructivism has greatly enriched the scholarly understanding of political processes by emphasizing that state interests are no fixed entities but fundamentally shaped by the types of interactions that states are involved in (e.g., Klotz, 1995; Wendt, 1999) Building on this premise, recent research has demonstrated that intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) provide forums for the transmission of human rights norms (Greenhill, 2010, 2016).. These studies identify a strong correlation between the human rights records of a country’s fellow IGO members and a state’s own human rights performance in subsequent periods This finding is primarily explained by socializing effects pointing to the transmission of group norms to individual states through repeated interactions.
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