Human Rights

Which actor identities and social or political cleavages shape public opinion on human rights violations? Building on social identity theory and moral typecasting theory, the research tests the relative impact of multiple identity characteristics on how Americans respond to alleged abuses.

This article asks how two types of large-scale conflict—major interstate wars and major civil wars—relate to children’s health, measured by infant mortality rates. Using country-year analysis across 1950–2007, the author examines both immediate and cumulative associations between time spent at war and infant mortality, and emphasizes what this evidence says about violations of children’s right to health without making causal claims beyond the study’s design.

This paper asks why North Korea—usually studied as a State Under Review—regularly issues human rights recommendations to other UN members in the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), and it shows that North Korea’s recommendations appear politically motivated. Using UPR records from 2008–2020, the authors argue that North Korea treats the UPR as a political forum: it ‘‘pats on the back’’ politically close states and ‘‘shames’’ politically distant or antagonistic ones. The study’s central contribution is to shift attention from North Korea as a reviewed target to North Korea as an active reviewer, and to document patterns in whom it praises and criticizes within the UPR.

This study asks whether symbolic transitional-justice sites — specifically a museum dedicated to past human-rights abuses — can shift citizens’ attitudes. The authors report results from a field experiment conducted at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile, tested on university students to measure whether a museum visit affects support for democratic institutions, rejection of repressive-period institutions, and support for restorative transitional-justice policies. The abstract frames effects as present across ideological priors and notes partial persistence up to six months after the visit.

This article asks whether variation across human rights treaties in the scope and demandingness of obligations influences states’ decisions to ratify. The authors argue that treaties differ in the number and severity of obligations they impose, that this variation can be measured, and that it affects ratification choices. Using newly compiled data on obligations and commitments across the 10 core global human rights treaties, the article tests whether treaties with more demanding obligations are less likely to be ratified by states that would face higher compliance costs.

The rise of international courts has dramatically changed how oppressive leaders are treated when arrested. This paper examines the shift by analyzing exile patterns using a newly compiled global dataset tracking leaders from 1946 to 2023.

This paper asks how well states implement recommendations from temporary national truth commissions, focusing on 11 Latin American cases and using existing coded data to measure compliance. It contributes by applying a multilevel ordered logistic model to recommendation-level implementation data and assessing which recommendation types and contextual factors are associated with higher or lower compliance.

This article tests whether the International Criminal Court (ICC) and related prosecutorial actions prevent conflict-related sexual violence by government forces in intrastate armed conflicts. Using the Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict (SVAC) dataset to analyze cases from 1989–2018, the authors compare outcomes across settings with ICC jurisdiction, ICC interventions, and cross-case ICC actions to assess whether prosecutions operate as a preventive strategy. The central contribution is an empirical test of claims that ICC activity reduces sexual violence, reporting qualified null and counterintuitive associations rather than clear deterrent effects.

This study asks whether renewable terms compromise judicial independence by creating incentives for judges to curry favor with actors who control their reappointment. Using a 2010 reform at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) that made judges’ terms nonrenewable with immediate effect, the author estimates how removing reappointment opportunities changed judges’ voting behavior on cases involving their nominating states. The paper’s contribution is a focused causal test of the reappointment mechanism versus selection explanations for pro-state voting.

Political scientists increasingly use supervised machine learning to code multiple labels from the same texts. The current practice of training separate supervised models for each label ignores relationships among labels and is likely to under-perform as a result.

Does government protection of human rights improve? The answer depends crucially on how we model it. Fariss (2014) proposed a statistical approach that produced latent scores suggesting an overall improving trend.

Civil society mobilization and human rights treaty ratifications put pressure on governments. But this can backfire: committed governments may demobilize critics to avoid scrutiny.

This article contends that Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) with strong, legally enforceable protections for foreign investors negatively impact human rights practices in developing nations.

Human Rights Organizations (HROs) are central actors in promoting rights and frequently deploy naming-and-shaming against states, but systematic measurement of those shaming efforts remains uneven. This paper reviews prior data efforts, introduces scalable quantitative approaches, and presents two new automated-coded datasets to map shaming events and their intensity.

There is an active debate about whether human rights standards have shifted over the past 30 years. Existing evidence rests on indicators produced by human coders who read the texts of human rights reports. This work reframes that debate as a supervised learning problem: if coders apply consistent standards over time, the mapping from textual features to human-coded scores should be time‑constant; if meanings have changed, identical textual features will receive different numerical scores at different times.

This paper examines how foreign aid allocation, tied to human rights and democracy promotion, is influenced by the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union. Using a natural experiment involving former colonizers holding key positions during budget discussions, it demonstrates that aid increases significantly when this occurs.

Local human rights organizations (LHROs) play a central role as intermediaries for citizens and advocates for police and justice reform. Public trust is essential for LHROs to be effective. This study asks whether crime reduces that trust—creating a “rights trap” that undermines LHRO legitimacy and prompts government retrenchment—or increases it, producing a “rights amplifier” that strengthens rights observance.

Economic sanctions are known to harm human rights (Peksen 2009; Wood 2008) and to affect democracy and leader survival (Peksen and Drury 2009, 2010; Escribà-Folch & Wright 2010; Marinov 2005). This study asks whether sanctions that specifically target segments of a regime’s leadership perform any better for human rights than conventional, country-wide sanctions.

The surge of reports from monitors like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the US State Department offers unprecedented detail on repression and rights protections—but most automatic approaches reduce texts to simple word counts that ignore syntax and word order, limiting what scholars and policy-makers can learn.

New approach addresses state self-selection into treaties.