US Human Rights Rhetoric: Strategic Deployment of Shaming, Pressuring, and Praising

Abstract

States routinely comment on other states’ human rights records, yet research focuses almost exclusively on shaming. I argue that governments choose among three modes of naming—shaming, pressuring, and praising—based on a strategic tradeoff between moral proportionality, reputational incentives, and diplomatic cost. Shaming and pressuring operate through negative reinforcement and rise as human rights conditions worsen, whereas praise functions through positive reinforcement and peaks at intermediate levels of respect for rights, where further improvement is both plausible and valuable. As conditions improve, states substitute away from costly shaming toward pressuring and praise. Strategic closeness moderates this logic: it amplifies the leverage of shaming when violations are severe but increases its diplomatic cost as conditions improve, prompting substitution toward softer rhetoric. I test these expectations using a new dataset of U.S. State Department human rights statements (1997–2020), classified with supervised learning and analyzed with multivariate hierarchical models. The results show systematic rhetorical substitution across modes and clarify how states manage the moral and political dimensions of human rights diplomacy.