Diffusing human trafficking policy adoption

Chapter Two narrows the focus to a case study analysis of Russia, Latvia, and Ukraine and examines how human trafficking policies diffuse in these three most-similar case studies from Eurasia. The results demonstrate that internal determinants such as state commitment to human trafficking policy and interest group strength are more important to policy adoption than external pressures from the international community. Conversely, state capacity and bureaucratic restructuring impede policy adoption. Instead of identifying international influence as an all-encompassing reason for policy adoption, data suggested that policy adoption was influenced by multifaceted pressures such as the Palermo Protocol, US TIP reports, the Council of Europe, and EU and ultimately country dependent. The chapter argues that policymaking is more nuanced than blind compliance with international treaties, as the literature suggests, and reveals that there is no black box of policymaking because even in authoritarian (Russia) and semi-authoritarian (Ukraine) regimes, policymaking does not occur in a vacuum. This type of policymaking shows that interest groups and policy entrepreneurs work within the constraints of national policymaking to adopt human trafficking policies even in non-democratic political systems.