Economic and Political Explanations of Human Rights Violations

Abstract

G OVERNMENTS organize police forces and armies to protect their citizens, build schools and hospitals to educate and care for them, and provide financial assistance for the old and unemployed. But governments also kill, torture, and imprison their citizens. This dark side of government knows no geographic, economic, ideological, or political boundary. In the Middle East, for example, Iraq has morbidly placed a "welcome" doormat at the entrance to its torture chamber-a place where prisoners are burned with cigarettes and electric hot plates, where electric shocks are administered to them, and where they are hanged from the ceiling. In Central America, the government of Guatemala tolerates the torture and killing of three church workers who were assisting refugees. In Africa, the Cameroons allows eight prisoners to die of malnutrition; South Africa, through its policy of apartheid, systematically violates the rights of its non white citizens. In Asia, Burmese army units operating in Karen state use local civilians as minesweepers. In Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union confines dissenters to psychiatric hospitals. In. Western Europe, the residents of Northern Ireland are subjected to trials that fail to conform to international standards, and civilians are shot by the security forces. 1 The list goes on. Unfortunately, this type of governmental behavior is-even in the late 20th century-a dismal characteristic of contemporary politics. Most of the world's countries hold some "prisoners of conscience" or detain po-* The order of the authors' names was randomly selected to reflect equal contributions to the research effort. An earlier version of this research was presented at the 1987 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. We would like to thank Professors Hank Jenkins-Smith and Philip Roeder of the University of New Mexico and Professor Ken Koehler of Iowa State University for their helpful comments and suggestions on this research. Thanks are also due to the Faculty Leave Program at Iowa State for supporting a portion of this research. ' These illustrations are taken from Amnesty International Report 1985, describing human rights conditions in 1984.

Democracy and Human Rights: Concepts, Measures, and Relationships

“…Large scale cross-national comparative analyses that specify civil and political rights protection as the dependent variable tend to use a narrow and procedural definition of democracy as an independent variable (see, e.g. Landman, 2005aLandman, , 2005bLandman & Carvalho, 2016;Mitchell & McCormick, 1988;Poe & Tate, 1994) in an effort to minimise the problem of endogeneity. Such studies show that democracy and human rights are indeed positively correlated with one another but not perfectly so.…”

“…Such studies show that democracy and human rights are indeed positively correlated with one another but not perfectly so. From the first cross-national study by Mitchell & McCormick (1988) to the latest pooled-cross section time-series models on human rights protection, there is a significant relationship between democracy and human rights.…”

Rigorous Morality: Norms, Values, and the Comparative Politics of Human Rights

“…that account for the variation in the protection of civil and political rights. 58 Subsequent studies use more complex data sets and additional domestic and international explanatory variables, which take into account such issues as direct foreign investment, structural adjustment loans, foreign aid, international treaty ratification, the presence of NGOs, membership of IGOs, globalisation and trade, among other factors. 59 In the case of inequality and human rights, the analysis found that even after controlling for other factors, there is indeed a significant relationship between high levels of income and land inequality on the one hand and the violation of physical integrity rights on the other.…”

“…17 Section three uses the case of Brazil to show how insights from field observations can generate hypotheses that can be tested through large-N comparative analysis of the kind that has dominated much of empirical political science since 1980s. 18 Section four charts a course at the 'meso' level between single-country studies and large-N studies to illustrate the ways in which the comparative analysis of carefully chosen cases can take into account the contextual specificities of different countries, while yielding inferences about the protection of human rights that apply beyond the cases under consideration. The final section argues that the comparative analysis of human rights is grounded in a set of epistemological and philosophical assumptions that transcend the 'fact-value' dichotomies in the social sciences in ways that allow empirical methods to challenge the kind of power relations that makes the continued violation of human rights and human dignity possible.…”

Torture Approval in Comparative Perspective

“…Comparative studies tend to emphasize two factors that are often associated with violations of personal integrity: economic development and democratic consolidation (Milner et al 1998;Mitchell and McCormick 1988). Quantitative studies of personal integrity violations provide a third relevant explanatory variable in the form of a measure for the frequency of these violations.…”