Whether external efforts to democratize are successful has been studied from various perspectives in the literature. There is a proliferous scholarship on norms diffusion related to democratization and human rights, but most of it suffers from lack of nuances of what is being diffused and nuanced effects norm diffusion produces.
There are two general streams of diffusion literature which are pertinent to this paper. One deals with diffusion mechanisms such as coercion, competition, emulation and learning (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, Klingler-Vidra and Schleifer 2014) and another one analyzes the receiving end and localization (Acharya, 2004). This paper on one hand tests mechanisms of diffusion and studies patterns of localization and yet on other hand aims to find correlates related to the sending and receiving sides of human rights diffusion, which is quite an understudied area.
This study utilizes discreteness of measures provided by Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem) regarding many human rights related indicators and it also uses data developed by the UN Office of High Commissioner on Human Rights in the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). UPR started in 2008 and by now almost all countries have gone at least through two cycles of review, when states voluntarily receive recommendations from other states on human rights issues. Changes in select human rights related V-Dem indicators in the periods of two UPR cycles (with time lags) are analyzed as a possible effect in regard to variables related to recommendations (issue, specificity, type of action recommended, response) and to recommending countries (territorial adjacency, post/colonial network, trade/investment relations, aid dependency, history of mutual war/conflict) and that is checked against control variables which can also serve as an explanation for these changes.
