Measuring the Impact of Human Rights: Conceptual and Methodological Debates

Abstract

Fifty years ago, the world had very few human rights laws and very little information on human rights violations. Today, the situation could not be more different. The world is awash in laws and indicators of legal violations, and two perspectives have developed to explain their relationship. The factualist approach measures whatever information is available, however imperfectly, and assumes that the resulting indicators are valid representations of the theoretical concepts of interest. The constructivist approach reminds us that these processes are not independent and that a science of law and human rights is fallible. Though the conclusions from these perspectives diverge radically, they agree on a central notion: that international human rights law has contributed very little to social progress. We disagree and offer an alternative, constitutive approach that both accepts the critique of indicators and offers a way forward that encourages scholars to treat measurement itself as an object of theorizing and inquiry.

Yes, Human Rights Practices Are Improving Over Time

“…This is because, for the past fifteen years, scholars have puzzled over the stagnating trend in country-year human rights and the negative correlation between UN human rights treaty ratifications and human rights (e.g., Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui 2005; Hathaway 2002). But these negative patterns are not valid because they did not account for changes in the source material used to generate the categorical data (Fariss 2014, 2018a, 2018b; Fariss and Dancy 2017). Thus, there is reason for new hope, new theorizing, and new data collection, which is the promise of the science of human rights (Schnakenberg and Fariss 2014).…”

“…The goal of measurement is to define an operational procedure that takes information and creates data free from conceptual (translational) error and measurement error (Fariss and Dancy 2017). A categorization process such as the Political Terror Scale (PTS) (Gibney et al 2017) or the CIRI human rights project (Cingranelli and Richards 1999) is an operational procedure designed to be consistently applied to human rights documents in order to categorize aggregated country-year human rights practices.…”

A Review on the Relationship Between Political Freedom and Economic Development

“…Then, they have soon been developed to measure the political variables such as political rights, civil liberties … etc. (Fariss and Dancy, 2017). Therefore, explaining different political variables' measuring methods calls for explaining the democracy indexes measures.…”

Impact of globalization on human rights: evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa

“…Since 1980s, PTS has been used by researchers in over 500 studies (Carleton and Stohl, 1985;Henderson, 1996;Blanton, 2000;Jorgensen, 2009;Fariss and Dancy, 2017;Bardall, 2018;Fong, 2019;Aarhus and Jakobsen, 2019;Chu, 2019). Other than PTS, many studies have also used the Physical Integrity Rights (PIR) index created by Cingranelli and Richards (1999) to the capture the state of human rights.…”