Replication Data for: Human Rights Institutionalization and U.S. Humanitarian Military Intervention

Are human rights a core value of U.S. foreign policy? If so, how does the
U.S. enforce human rights standards? Extant studies maintain that mass
media, public opinion, and/or political concerns drive U.S. decisions to
engage in humanitarian military interventions. In this study, we explore
the extent to which “human rights institutionalization” through the State
Department’s human rights reporting affects the likelihood of U.S.
humanitarian interventions. We find that human rights
institutionalization is a viable, and perhaps even the best, explanation for
the robust connection between human rights violations and deployment
of the U.S. military. These findings suggest that the U.S. is willing to
undertake costly action to enforce international standards of human
rights, but with some important caveats. Overall, we provide large-N,
quantitative support for the broader shifts in U.S. humanitarian
intervention described by qualitative scholars and experts in U.S.
strategy and security policy.