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

Abstract

Human rights rhetoric is a central instrument of U.S. foreign policy, used to enforce international norms and shape global expectations. While most existing research focuses on state shaming within multilateral institutions, this paper introduces a new dataset compiled from over 20,000 U.S. State Department press statements (1997–2020) and analyzes when the U.S. chooses to shame, pressure, or praise other countries’ human rights practices. Drawing on theories of strategic norm enforcement, I argue that a) the U.S. decision to praise has non-linear relationship with the human rights level in the target country; b) the U.S. substitutes shaming for pressuring when rhetorical escalation is diplomatically costless. Using multivariate zero-inflated Poisson model with log-normal layer and hierarchical Poisson-multinomial model, I find support for the theory. The U.S. use of human rights shaming and praising is most likely when the marginal benefit of making changes in the target is the highest, i.e. when the human rights level is ‘mid,’ and the U.S. strategically avoids shaming close allies with poor rights records – turning instead to pressuring as a safer, norm-imposing alternative. The U.S. also tends to shame very close allies with bad rights records suggesting additional logics such as US leverage. These findings contribute to our understanding of how states exercise rhetorical power in the international system and highlight the strategic flexibility of human rights discourse in U.S. diplomacy.