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Yes, Human Rights Practices Are Improving Over Time

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 May 2019

CHRISTOPHER J. FARISS Open the ORCID record for CHRISTOPHER J. FARISS [Opens in a new window]
CHRISTOPHER J. FARISS*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
*
*Christopher J. Fariss, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, [email protected].
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Abstract

To document human rights, monitoring organizations establish a standard of accountability, or a baseline set of expectations that states ought to meet in order to be considered respectful of human rights. If the standard of accountability has meaningfully changed, then the categorized variables from human rights documents will mask real improvements. Cingranelli and Filippov question whether the standard of accountability is changing and whether data on mass killings are part of the same underlying conceptual process of repression as other abuses. These claims are used to justify alternative models, showing no improvement in human rights. However, by focusing on the coding process, the authors misunderstand that the standard of accountability is about how monitoring organizations produce documents in the first place and not how academics use published documents to create data. Simulations and latent variables that model time in a substantively meaningful way validate the conclusion that human rights are improving.

Type
Letter
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 113 , Issue 3 , August 2019 , pp. 868 - 881
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2019 

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Footnotes

Special thanks to Michael Kenwick and Kevin Reuning, who have provided an immeasurable amount of assistance and support as I prepared this response. Much of the work builds on several joint measurement projects that are currently underway (Reuning, Kenwick, and Fariss Forthcoming). I also acknowledge research support from the SSK (SocialScience Korea) Human Rights Forum, the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea, and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2016S1A3A2925085). Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/EB8DD8.

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