Respect for Human Rights has Improved Over Time: Modeling the Changing Standard of Accountability

According to indicators of political repression currently used by scholars, human rights practices have not improved over the past 35 years, despite the spread of human rights norms, better monitoring, and the increasing prevalence of electoral democracy. I argue that this empirical pattern is not a...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inThe American political science review Vol. 108; no. 2; pp. 297 - 318
Main Author FARISS, CHRISTOPHER J.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York, USA Cambridge University Press 01.05.2014
Subjects
Accountability
Amnesties
Amnesty
Automation
Coding
Content analysis
Death
Democracy
Departments
Electoral College
Electoral systems
Estimates
Genocide
Human Rights
Indexes (Measures)
Intellectuals
International relations
Item Response Theory
Massacres
Mathematical constants
Modeling
Monitoring
Nonprofit organizations
Parametric models
Political activism
Political persecution
Political science
Ratification
Reporting standards
Repression
Repression (Political)
Torture
Treaties
U.S.A
UN Conventions
United Nations
Variables
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:According to indicators of political repression currently used by scholars, human rights practices have not improved over the past 35 years, despite the spread of human rights norms, better monitoring, and the increasing prevalence of electoral democracy. I argue that this empirical pattern is not an indication of stagnating human rights practices. Instead, it reflects a systematic change in the way monitors, like Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department, encounter and interpret information about abuses. The standard of accountability used to assess state behaviors becomes more stringent as monitors look harder for abuse, look in more places for abuse, and classify more acts as abuse. In this article, I present a new, theoretically informed measurement model, which generates unbiased estimates of repression using existing data. I then show that respect for human rights has improved over time and that the relationship between human rights respect and ratification of the UN Convention Against Torture is positive, which contradicts findings from existing research.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 23
ISSN:0003-0554
1537-5943
DOI:10.1017/S0003055414000070