Does Institutional Change Spread Across Countries? Explaining Spatial Patterns in Human Rights†

If a country improves its human rights record, will neighbouring countries benefit? Beneficial spillovers could justify intervention by the UN or one of the many other organisations that internationally fight human rights violations. We document that countries’ human rights performances often resemble the human rights situation of their neighbours. However, exploiting time variation in a spatial panel, we find that much of that resemblance is simply determined by the shared geographical location. Changes in neighbouring countries have little influence on local human rights, suggesting that contemporaneous spillovers and interactions are limited.