Why Shaming Foreign Rights Abusers Helps Governments at Home

Why Shaming Abroad Matters

Shaming foreign human rights violators is a common diplomatic tactic, but its domestic political consequences are understudied. Lotem Bassan-Nygate asks whether governments that publicly criticize other states for rights abuses change public opinion at home—both in terms of government approval and citizens' tolerance for human rights violations domestically. Understanding these effects clarifies incentives that drive governments to call out abuses abroad.

How the Study Tests Shaming at Home

The article uses two survey experiments conducted with U.S. respondents to simulate instances of government-led criticism of foreign human rights offenders. The experiments measure respondents' evaluations of the criticizing government (government approval and perceived commitment to human rights) and their tolerance for specific kinds of domestic human rights violations. To check whether experimental patterns generalize beyond the U.S., the author supplements the experiments with cross-national observational analyses.

Main Findings

• Public shaming of foreign rights violators tends to improve the criticizing government's image among domestic audiences, increasing approval and signaling a commitment to human rights.
• At the same time, shaming can modestly alter citizens' tolerance of certain domestic human rights violations, suggesting a potential trade-off between reputational gains and domestic human-rights norms.
• These effects are described as modest in size but consistent across the experimental treatments.

Cross-National Corroboration

Supplementary observational analyses across countries show patterns consistent with the experimental results, bolstering the claim that the domestic effects of foreign shaming are not confined to a single national context.

Why It Matters for Policy and Scholarship

The findings illuminate a political logic behind public human-rights criticism: shaming can be a tool to boost domestic approval and demonstrate virtue on rights, even while it may nudge tolerance toward particular domestic violations. This shapes scholars' and policymakers' understanding of the incentives that lead governments to publicly condemn rights abuses abroad and highlights trade-offs between international advocacy and domestic human-rights attitudes.