Has government protection of human rights improved? The answer to this and many other research questions is strongly affected by the assumptions we make and the modeling strategy we choose as the basis for creating human rights country scores. Fariss (2014) introduced a statistical model that produced latent scores showing an improving trend in human rights. Consistent with his stringent assumptions, his statistical model heavily weighted rare incidents of mass killings such as genocide, while discounting indicators of lesser and more common violations such as torture and political imprisonment. We replicated his analysis, replacing the actual values of all indicators of lesser human rights violations with randomly generated data, and obtained an identical improving trend. However, when we replicated the analysis, relaxing his assumptions by allowing all indicators to potentially have a similar effect on the latent scores, we find no human rights improvement.

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This article argues that human rights could be improved by motivating politicians and bureaucrats to put more effort into protecting human rights. It conceptualizes the production of human rights practices as the outcome of two principal-agent relationships that constrain politicians and bureaucrats. Reliance on taxes is a non-electoral, fiscal factor that makes politicians more willing to protect human rights. Increased government revenue, no matter the source, raises bureaucratic compensation and helps create a more accountable bureaucracy. Thus both a higher reliance on taxes and larger state revenues lead to the better protection of human rights. Each fiscal factor promotes a different type of accountability, both of which independently contribute to good human rights practices.

Because of the redistributive nature of institutions and the availability of implementable alternatives with different distributive consequences, the desire of federation members to change institutional specifics in their favor is a permanent feature of the federal political process. This is so for two reasons. First, states or their equivalents in democratic federations usually can succeed in renegotiating the rules if they feel sufficiently motivated to do so. Second, in the case of a federation it is more or less clear who stands to benefit from any change in institutions. Thus, the existence of an equilibrium of constitutional legitimacy at the popular and elite levels cannot be taken for granted. The authors show that the presence in the political process of agents who are 'naturally committed' to the status-quo institutional arrangement can suffice to coordinate voters to act as if they support existing constitutional arrangements.

In this essay we identify economic and political factors that led both the federal centre and the regions in Russia first to open the process of federal bargaining and then to pursue it in the form of signing bilateral treaties, unique for each region. Many Russian politicians and most scholars of Russian politics view asymmetric bilateral bargaining as a dangerous institutional choice contributing to federal instability and potentially threatening the disintegration of Russia. We offer an alternative view. While the treaty-signing practices are actively maintained by Russian political elites, we argue that the genesis of asymmetric bilateral bargaining in Russia had a strong ‘path dependence’ component. In particular, it was precipitated by the developments of the last period in evolution of the Soviet federalism.