Examining nearly 6300 U.S. State Department human rights reports spanning four decades, this study uses structural topic modeling (STM) to uncover patterns in scrutiny.
Topics Analyzed: Physical integrity rights violations (killings/disappearances), freedoms of expression and movement, labor rights, etc., identified through STM analysis.
Key Finding: Scrutiny varies significantly over time and across countries. Crucially, U.S. allies receive disproportionately more attention for physical integrity rights issues than non-allies.
Why This Matters: These results challenge existing assumptions about human rights monitoring and demonstrate how geopolitical relationships can shape which rights violations merit greater documentation.
| The Politics of Scrutiny in Human Rights Monitoring: Evidence from Structural Topic Models of U.S. State Department Human Rights Reports was authored by Benjamin Bagozzi and Daniel Berliner. It was published by Cambridge in PSR&M in 2018. |
