Institutionalizing human rights: The United Nations, nongovernmental organizations and national human rights institutions

This dissertation bridges the literatures on international institutions, transnational activism, and human rights to answer one very important but understudied question: Under what conditions do states adopt the United Nations idea of national human rights institutions and create a permanent and independent state institution to promote and protect human rights in line with the UN international standards? Despite the growing importance of these institutions for human rights enforcement, democratic consolidation, and post-conflict social integration, this question has received little analytic attention in the fields of international relations and comparative politics. I argue that human rights nongovernmental organizations influence the government decision to establish a national institution and to comply with the UN international standards by leveraging the UN Paris Principles and mobilizing human rights criticism. In the human rights issue area characterized by low cross-border externalities, sovereignty-bound international organizations, and weak self-enforcement by states, nongovernmental organizations are especially important as a channel through which the UN influences sovereign states. Both statistical and case-based evidence supports my argument. I conduct the event history analysis on a sample of 163 UN member states during the period from 1978 to 2004 by utilizing the most accurate new data on human rights international nongovernmental organizations, domestic activists' participation in the 1993 UN World Conference on Human Rights, and human rights criticism. Two in-depth case studies complement the statistical tests by tracing the actual causal processes of establishing the national human rights commissions in Mexico and South Korea. My dissertation advances scholarly understanding of how international organizations influence the domestic politics of sovereign states by integrating the literatures on international institutions and transnational activism. This dissertation sheds new light on the institutionalization of government accountability by demonstrating how democratic institutional changes are informed by transnational ideas and actors. By moving beyond the narrow focus on the UN and regional organizations to study the role of nongovernmental stakeholders in the diffusion process, my dissertation provides new insights about how human rights norm diffusion occurs. This dissertation demonstrates the effects of nongovernmental organizations in world politics by providing a theoretical synthesis and rigorous empirical tests.