The Statistical Analysis of International Human Rights: Of Markov Chains and Bayesian Measurement

Poster: Poster Summary (in .pdf format)

This project unifies a series of papers examining the determinants of international human rights, the details of which are listed below. The central arguments of these papers combine critical theoretical analysis with more appropriate estimation techniques for the analysis of international human rights. As the papers are completed, I will post them here.

Democracy and Human Rights Abuses: Insights from First-Order Markov Models

Paper: Democracy and Human Rights Abuses: Insights from First-Order Markov Models (in .pdf format)

Presentation: Democracy and Human Rights Abuses: TeXpower for Texas A & M Department of Statistics and Department of Political Science and Program in Applied Statistics at Washington University (in .pdf format)

This paper reconsiders the dynamic relationship between democracy and a variety of human rights abuses. We argue that existing research has failed to distinguish the effects of repression on political competitors and mass publics. This distinction provides a rationale for the belief that democracy conditionally influences respect for human rights in ways that depend on past practice. Furthermore, we argue that this distinction applies to both linear (Poe and Tate (1994) and Poe, Tate and Keith (1999), among others) and threshold (Davenport and Armstrong (2004)) specifications of the relationship between democracy and human rights abuses. We test this claim in a first-order Markovian ordered probit model of global human rights abuses covering the period 1976-2003 across six different measures of human rights abuses. Consistent with our expectations, the effect of political democracy critically depends on the past history of respect for human rights. At low levels of prior repression, democracy limits human rights abuses, but when past repression is widespread, democracy has no effect on respect for personal integrity rights. These results provide an important qualification of existing findings and imply that democracy alone is insufficient to eliminate the abuse of basic human rights.