Moving the Needle: Recommendation Precision and Compliance with Women’s Rights Recommendations

Jillienne Haglund; Courtney Hillebrecht

doi:10.1093/isq/sqae155

Moving the Needle: Recommendation Precision and Compliance with Women’s Rights Recommendations

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

International human rights institutions impose obligations on their member states that extend long past the ratification stage. Each year, states receive tens, or even hundreds, of recommendations from international human rights bodies. These recommendations demand that states change their human rights policies and practices. While recent scholarship has emphasized the important role of domestic institutions and civil society actors in facilitating compliance with these recommendations, comparatively little research examines how the quality of the recommendations themselves affects compliance outcomes. Using two novel datasets, this paper sets out to understand the nexus between recommendation quality and compliance. Our research suggests that highly precise recommendations move the needle away from inaction on international human rights institutions’ rulings and recommendations but make full compliance more difficult. This paper advances the existing literature on the dynamics of compliance and places some of the responsibility for compliance on the international human rights institutions themselves.

Original language	English
Article number	sqae155
Journal	International Studies Quarterly
Volume	69
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqae155
State	Published - Mar 1 2025

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) (2024). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association.

Funding

Authors\u2019 note: We wish to acknowledge the helpful comments provided by the participants of the Human Rights on the Edge Virtual Conference hosted by the Global Human Rights Hub at Arizona State University in April, 2021 and the participants of the Constructing and Deconstructing International Law Conference at Arizona State University held in April, 2022, as well as colleagues at the University of Nebraska\u2013Lincoln, the University of Kentucky, the University of Tennessee, and the College of William and Mary who invited us to share our work and provided insightful comments. The data analyzed in this article (WR2D2 and WRCD) were collected with the financial support of the National Science Foundation Grant from the Law and Social Sciences Program\u2014SES-1823804/1823771. The data underlying this article are available on the ISQ Dataverse at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/isq .

Funders	Funder number
U.S. Department of Energy Chinese Academy of Sciences Guangzhou Municipal Science and Technology Project Oak Ridge National Laboratory Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment National Science Foundation National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center National Natural Science Foundation of China
Law and Social Sciences Program	SES-1823804/1823771

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Sociology and Political Science
Political Science and International Relations

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10.1093/isq/sqae155

Cite this

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Moving the Needle: Recommendation Precision and Compliance with Women’s Rights Recommendations

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Funding

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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