How naming and shaming affects human rights perceptions in the shamed country

Abstract

Although individual citizens perceive the human rights conditions in their country differently, existing research on human rights and public opinion has tended to ignore the possible impact from international sources of information. This article builds upon previous research on human rights, public opinion, and international organizations by arguing that citizens will perceive the human rights conditions in their country more negatively when their country is shamed by the international community for human rights violations. This hypothesis is tested using both observational and experimental methods. I use multilevel modeling and survey responses from both the Gallup International Millennium Survey and the World Values Survey to show that individual human rights perceptions are negatively related to the adoption of resolutions by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights shaming a survey respondent’s government for human rights abuses, as well as the number of human rights-focused international nongovernmental organizations with members or volunteers living within the survey respondent’s country. These results are supplemented by an original, web-based experiment on human rights perceptions in the United States and India in which survey respondents are exposed to an experimental manipulation modeled on press statements from Amnesty International shaming the survey respondent’s country for human rights abuses.