The (co)evolution of human rights advocacy: Understanding human rights issue emergence over time

Abstract

How does the discussion of human rights issues change over time? Without advocates adopting a human rights issue in the first place, international ‘shaming’ cannot occur. In this article, we examine how human rights discussions converge and diverge around new frames and new issues over time. Human rights norms do not evolve alone; their prevalence, framing, and focus are all dependent on how they relate to other norms in the advocacy community. Drawing on over 30,000 documents from dozens of human rights organizations from 1990 to 2011, we provide a temporal overview and visualization of the ebb and flow of human rights issues. Using our new dataset and state-of-the-art methods from computer science, our approach allows us to quantitatively examine (a) how new issues emerge in the advocacy network, (b) the relationship of these new issues to extant human rights advocacy and information, and (c) how the framing and specificity of these issues change over time. By focusing on the process by which a new issue gets incorporated into the work of advocates, we provide an empirical assessment of the first step in the causal process connecting shaming to improvement in human rights practices.

The Right Accounting of Wrongs: Examining Temporal Changes to Human Rights Monitoring and Reporting

“…They find that new topics or rights do indeed appear in more recent human rights reports 10 . Park, Murdie, and Davis (2019) similarly find that there is an evolution of topic coverage over time in various human rights organizations' reports 11 . Analyzing the hierarchical structure of human rights reports from the SD, AI, and HRW, Park, Greene, and Colaresi (2020) also find that there has been a significant increase in human rights topics or concepts.…”

International organizations and research methods: an introduction

“…Some studies have aimed at mapping positions of IO members regarding a specific issue or policy (Bagozzi 2015;Frid-Nielsen 2018) or to examine the influence of interest groups on choices of policy outcomes (Klüver 2009). Other studies have also applied methods of computerized textual analysis for the purposes of analyzing the content of a certain agenda, and the changes of framing of an agenda over time (Park, Murdie, and Davis 2019;Schönfeld et al 2018).…”

“…The application of topic modeling in political science has focused on examining the content of political actors' agendas (i.e., Grimmer 2010). In IO research, topic modeling was thus far applied mainly to examine changes in framing of a certain issue over time among different IOs (Park et al 2019) as well as to assess the impact of positions of members of an IO regarding a certain issue (Bagozzi 2015). As topic modeling can be applied to detect latent agendas of certain actors (Grimmer 2010), its application in IO research can provide a comprehensive understanding of agenda salience within an IO framework.…”

Can We Algorithmize Politics? The Promise and Perils of Computerized Text Analysis in Political Research

“…Public discourse at the international level is an essential source of data, and computerized methods can foster systematic examination of the interactions that ultimately design our primary subject matter: world politics. Indeed, in recent years, we have witnessed nascent albeit burgeoning literature applying CTA-based research to various corpora: nongovernmental-organization reports (e.g., Fariss et al 2015;Park, Murdie, and Davis 2019); international investment agreements (Alschner and Skougarevskiy 2016); international climate-change negotiations (Bagozzi 2015); the United Nations Security Council (Schönfeld et al 2019); the United Nations General Debate (UNGD) corpus (see, e.g., Baturo, Dasandi, and Mikhaylov 2017;Chelotti, Dasandi, and Mikhaylov 2021;Dieng, Ruiz, and Blei 2019;Gurciullo and Mikhaylov 2017a;Watanabe and Zhou 2020); and academic discourse in IR journals (Steffek, Müller, and Behr 2021;Whyte 2019).…”