The More Things Stay the Same the More They Change : : Measuring Changing Levels of Human Rights Using Computational Methods

According to indicators of political repression currently used by scholars, human rights practices have not improved over the past 35 years, despite the spread of human rights norms, better monitoring, and the increasing prevalence of electoral democracy. I argue that this empirical pattern is not an indication of stagnating human rights practices. Instead, it reflects a systematic change in the way monitors encounter and interpret information about abuses. The standard of accountability used to assess state behaviors becomes more stringent as monitors look harder for abuse, look in more places for abuse, and classify more acts as abuse. In chapter 1, I present a new, theoretically informed measurement model, which generates unbiased estimates of repression. I also show that respect for human rights has improved over time and that the relationship between human rights respect and ratification of the UN Convention Against Torture is positive, which contradicts findings from existing research. In chapter 2, I demonstrate other modeling techniques for measuring human rights. In chapter 3, I demonstrate that the ratification of human rights treaties is empirically associated with higher levels of respect for human rights over time and across countries. This positive relationship is robust to a variety of measurement strategies and model specifications. Overall, a new picture emerges of improving levels of respect for human rights, which coincides with the increasing embeddedness of countries within the international human rights regime. In chapter 4, I extend the model and estimate the distribution of the number of individuals killed for each country-year observation in one of the original event-based datasets. The model explicitly accounts for the uncertainty inherent in counting this type of difficult to observe event. To validate the new model, I focus on one dataset, which defines one-sided government killing as government caused deaths of non-combatant