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

Abstract

States engage with human rights norms not only by condemning violations but also by adjusting the tone of their rhetoric. This paper broadens the focus of research beyond shaming to theorize rhetorical calibration - how governments shift among shaming, pressuring, and praising to balance moral signaling with diplomatic cost. Using a new dataset of U.S. Department of State press statements (1997–2020), classified through supervised machine learning and analyzed with hierarchical count models, the paper examines how human rights performance and strategic closeness shape these rhetorical choices. The results reveal that shaming declines concavely as human rights conditions improve—falling slowly when violations are severe but sharply once conditions surpass a credibility threshold—while pressuring declines more linearly and praise follows an inverted-U pattern, peaking where room for improvement is higher. Strategic closeness exerts a dual influence: it heightens the use of shaming toward allies when moral stakes are high, but promotes substitution toward softer rhetoric as conditions improve. This pattern does not contradict relational theories of norm enforcement but extends them, showing that shaming close partners can serve as a signal of credibility rather than inconsistency. Conceptually, the study introduces rhetorical calibration as a framework for understanding how states manage the tradeoff between legitimacy and diplomacy through language, offering a more nuanced account of how moral and strategic logics intersect in human rights diplomacy.