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.