Imagining a World without the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is thought to have shaped constitutions profoundly since its adoption in 1948. ZACHARY ELKINS and TOM GINSBURG identify two empirical implications that should follow from such influence. 
First, UDHR content should be reflected in subsequent national constitutions, the authors state in their article in the journal World Politics.
Second, such reflections should bear the particular marks of the UDHR itself, not those of the postwar zeitgeist more broadly, they write in the article titled ‘Imagining a World without the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’. 
ELKINS and GINSBURG 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.

Elkins, Z., & Ginsburg, T. (2022). Imagining a World without the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. World Politics, 74(3), 327-366. doi:10.1017/S0043887122000065