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Imagining a World without the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 July 2022

Zachary Elkins Open the ORCID record for Zachary Elkins [Opens in a new window]  and
Tom Ginsburg
Zachary Elkins*
Affiliation:
Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, USA
Tom Ginsburg
Affiliation:
University of Chicago Law School, Chicago, Illinois, USA
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: zelkins@austin.utexas.edu
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Abstract

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is thought to have shaped constitutions profoundly since its adoption in 1948. The authors identify two empirical implications that should follow from such influence. First, UDHR content should be reflected in subsequent national constitutions. Second, such reflections should bear the particular marks of the UDHR itself, not those of the postwar zeitgeist more broadly. The authors examine the historical evidence at various levels to identify and untangle the UDHR's impact. In a macro analysis, they leverage an original data set on the content of constitutions since 1789. They explore historical patterns in the creation and spread of rights, and test whether 1948 exhibits a noticeable disruption in rights provision. The authors build a multivariate model that predicts rights provision with constitution- and rights-level covariates. To gain further analytic leverage, they unearth the process that produced the UDHR and identify plausible alternative formulations evident in a set of discarded proposals. The authors further test the plausibility of UDHR influence by searching for direct references to the document in subsequent constitutional texts and constitutional proceedings. The evidence suggests that the UDHR significantly accelerated the adoption of a particular set of constitutional rights.

Keywords

constitutionsdiffusionhuman rightstreatiesUniversal Declaration of Human RightsUnited Nationscritical juncture
Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 74 , Issue 3 , July 2022 , pp. 327 - 366
Copyright
Copyright © 2022 Trustees of Princeton University

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