Designing Human Rights: A Global Analysis of Institutional Diffusion and Strength

This paper sets out to offer an explanation of global patterns of variation in institutional design focusing on the case of country behaviour when establishing national institutions for the promotion and protection of human rights. Building on studies of policy design and institutional diffusion, this paper aims to further the discussion by proposing the first study of global patterns that takes into account the institutional design of human rights institutions at the national level as an indicator of their strength and ultimately a measure of states’ willingness to comply with standards of international behaviour in the human rights regime set up by major international actors such as the United Nations and the European Union. The categorical dependent variable – the strength of human rights institutions – measures degrees of compliance with six dimensions of institutional design features recommended by the UN-endorsed framework of the Paris Principles. The analysis is based on an original global dataset consisting of survey and report data on 194 countries, including data on both UN-accredited and non-accredited national human rights institutions. Institutional surveys on design features were administered to a sample of the countries/institutions in the dataset, offering systematic insight into the variation in design of institutions that have never sought to participate in the peer-review assessment process involved in the UN accreditation system. The paper presents findings based on an analysis of the explanatory power of a number of diffusion mechanisms, among which socialization, acculturation, and indirect and direct incentives, which account for the variation in strength of national institutions for the promotion and protection of human rights across countries and regions.