Thinking Inside the Box: A Closer Look at Democracy and Human Rights

Research on human rights consistently points to the importance of de-mocracy in reducing the severity and incidence of personal integrity abuses. The prescriptive implications of this finding for policy makers interested in state building have been somewhat limited, however, by a reliance on multidimensional measures of democracy. Consequently, a policy maker emerges from this literature confident that ‘‘democracy matters’ ’ but unclear about which set(s) of reforms is likely to yield a greater human rights payoff. Using data from the Polity IV Project, we examine what aspects of democracy are most consequential in improv-ing a state’s human rights record. Analysis of democracy’s dimensions elicits three findings. First, political participation at the level of multi-party competition appears more significant than other dimensions in reducing human rights abuses. Second, improvements in a state’s level of democracy short of full democracy do not promote greater respect for integrity rights. Only those states with the highest levels of democ-racy, not simply those conventionally defined as democratic, are corre-lated with better human rights practices. Third, accountability appears to be the critical feature that makes full-fledged democracies respect human rights; limited accountability generally retards improvement in human rights. For those interested in state building and human rights in states such as Afghan-istan, Cambodia, and Iraq, the most prescriptively provocative finding in the emerging research literature on human rights is the importance of democracy (Po