David L. Richards

The Cingranelli and Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Data Project

The CIRI Human Rights Data Project provides information about government respect for a broad array of human rights in nearly every country in the world. Covering twenty-six years, fifteen separate human rights practices, and 195 countries, it is one of the largest human rights data sets in the world. This essay provides an overview of the CIRI project and our response to some critiques of the CIRI physical integrity rights index. Compared to the Political Terror Scale (PTS), the CIRI physical integrity rights index is focused on government human rights practices, can be disaggregated, is more transparent in its construction, and is more replicable because of the transparency of our coding rules. Furthermore, unlike the PTS, the unidimensionality of the CIRI index has been demonstrated empirically. For these reasons, the CIRI index is a more valid index of physical integrity rights.

Good Things to Those Who Wait? National Elections and Government Respect for Human Rights

What exactly is it about democracy that enables it to protect human rights? As part of the research program addressing that important question, this article examines the relationship between democratic national legislative and presidential elections and government respect for human rights in over 100 countries from 1981 to 2000. Both presidential (direct and semi-presidential) and lower-house national legislative elections are found to be reliably associated with greater government respect for human rights, but only in the years following an election and not in election years themselves. Interestingly, national legislative elections were found to be associated with greater government respect for human rights, while presidential elections were associated with less respect for human rights. Consequently, the authors caution that the historically popular concept of electoralism (the use of elections alone as a proxy for full democracy) is unlikely to play a positive part in any policy intending to protect human rights.

Respect for Physical-Integrity Rights in the Twenty-First Century: Evaluating Poe and Tate's Model 20 Years Later

Poe and Tates 1994 study is likely the most influential in the quantitative study of human rights, serving as a foundation for a great deal of scholarship. In this article, we briefly consider the impact this article had on academic research on state repression, particularly in relation to democracy. We then empirically revisit Poe and Tates model using a longer timeframe, updated method of estimation, improved measure of state repression, improved measures of some independent variables, and a spatial indicator. We stratify our results by specific physical-integrity right, world region, and time, finding variation in the associates of state repression across types of rights and world regions but stability over time. Finally, like Davenport and Armstrong (2004), we find a threshold where democracys protective effects appear to begin, but this threshold differs across specific types of rights and that democracy may have rights-protective effects at lower levels than expected.

Banking Crises, Collective Protest and Rebellion

Developed and developing countries, regardless of geographic region, have experienced economic and political turmoil associated with banking sector failures. Economists often acknowledge the existence of political pressures associated with the containment and solution to banking failures. However, analyses of corrective bank intervention policies routinely discount or downplay the potential political hazards and costs associated with such policies ~see Enoch, 2000; Frydl and Quintyn, 2000; Garcia, 1997; Kaufman and Seelig, 2001; Lindgren et al., 1996!. Thus, while there exists a growing body of literature studying the economic costs of banking meltdowns, little scholarly attention has been devoted to actually examining the relationship between banking crises and domestic agitation ~internal conflict!. We believe that the failure to explore the impact of banking crises on domestic agitation risks excluding a key component in understanding the puzzle of domestic political stability. The financial sector plays the crucial role of dispersing capital to competing domestic interests and the failure of domestic banks has significant repercussions on domestic economic and societal stability ~Carstens et al., 2004; Hardy, 1998; Stiglitz, 2003!. Furthermore, banks are generally considered more fragile and subject to failure than other firms ~Kaufman, 2000; Rennhack, 2000!.

Violence against women and the law

Chapter 1 Forms of Violence against Women Chapter 2 Political, Economic, and Social Determinants of Domestic Gender-Based-Violence Policy Chapter 3 Legal Frameworks Chapter 4 Creating Indicators of Legal Guarantees Chapter 5 Discoveries from Our Data Conclusion

The Myth of Information Effects in Human Rights Data: Response to Ann Marie Clark and Kathryn Sikkink

In August 2013, Ann Marie Clark and Kathryn Sikkink published “Information Effects and Human Rights Data: Is the Good News about Increased Human Rights Information Bad News for Human Rights Measures?” in this journal.1 Their article examines important issues related to indicators of government respect for physical integrity rights from the Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Data Project as well as the Political Terror Scale (PTS) index of physical integrity conditions. Using a data set about Latin America and the case examples of Brazil and Guatemala, they make an argument that an increased amount of information over time in the US State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, as evidenced by growing word counts, is responsible for a downward bias in scores indicating government respect for human rights over time.2

Worth What We Decide: A Defense of the Right to Leisure

One of the most routinely philosophically and politically attacked sections of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is article 24: ‘Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.’ Defending against these attacks is important. For example, only the USA and Somalia, among UN member states, are not parties to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). One reason for the USAs status is political opposition to CRC article 31, which maintains ‘States parties recognize the right of the child to rest and leisure….’ Our article defends article 24 from well-known criticisms. We maintain rights are social constructs and, as evidence of social construction, we provide a genealogy of article 24. We also address the social psychology of rest/leisure and trends in actual state practice.

Enforcement of sexual violence law in post-civil conflict societies:

The climate of impunity in many post-civil conflict societies results in unprecedented levels of violence against women, making legal implementation and law enforcement particularly difficult. We argue that the presence of strong legal provisions mediates the negative influence of the post-civil conflict environment on violence against women. Specifically, we examine the role of strong legal protections on the enforcement of sexual violence legislation in post-civil conflict countries. To examine our hypothesis, we utilize an original dataset measuring the strength and enforcement of domestic legal statutes addressing violence against women for the years 2007–2010 in post-civil conflict countries. We find elements of civil conflict as well as domestic and international legal regimes to be reliably associated with the enforcement of violence against women laws and rape prevalence in post-civil conflict states.

“Rhetoric and Reality” Revisited

One need not wade through a boggy foundationalist debate to appreciate that the idea of human rights has a now long-standing relationship with international law. Scholars, policymakers, and activists muse and debate about both what is, and what should be, the nature of this relationship, and David Forsythe’s voice has been among the most important to have weighed in on these issues. International law has been not the backdrop but, rather, the oxygen on which his scholarly work about foreign policy and international organizations has flourished since 1971. This article does not attempt to represent the full arc of David’s Forsythe’s lifetime of scholarly inquiry in these areas as, indeed, much of his work has been informed in one way or another by international law. Rather, I focus on the political lessons presented in his article “American Foreign Policy and Human Rights: Rhetoric and Reality,” published in 1980 in the journal Universal Human Rights (now known as Human Rights Quarterly). I think this article deserves a second look, as both its framework for examining the relationship between international law and human rights-based US foreign policy and the lessons it uncovered thereby still resonate these many years later. Furthermore, this article carries historical importance of its own as, while qualitative, it helped set the table for a wave of quantitative studies over the next decade and a half that examined the human rights records of US presidents, both alone and in relation to one another (see Stohl, Carleton, and Johnson 1984; Carleton and Stohl 1985; Cingranelli and Pasquarello 1985; McCormick and Mitchell 1988; Poe 1991, 1992; Poe and Sirirangsi 1994).

Transnational Torture: Law, Violence, and State Power in the United States and India by Jinee Lokaneeta

Jinee Lokaneeta’s book, Transnational Torture: Law, Violence, and State Power in the United States and India begins with a well-researched accounting of numerous US legal cases wherein a variety of courts that had the opportunity to directly address the issue of violence in interrogations instead fell silent on the matter. Reading this section of the book creates an exasperation fueled by the recognition of opportunities now lost to time. For example, while Boumediene v. Bush (2008) was indeed “one of the most effective rebuttals of both the executive and the Congress for suspending a basic liberty [habeas corpus] that had always been available to citizens and noncitizens” Lokaneeta points out “the [US Supreme] Court’s silence on the question of torture” was “troubling” (96). The silence of the Court is even worse given the amicus briefs asking the Court to address coerced statements. The book is weaker, however, when explaining rather than accounting. Lokaneeta revives Foucault’s “excess violence” concept—violence deemed unnecessary or undesirable by government but that, nonetheless, persists and is ultimately accommodated—to describe the phenomenon that is being allowed to flourish, but her focus on her reading of this concept as a new scholarly contribution ultimately frustrates her ability to make such a contribution to the existing scholarship on state repression. This is mostly because neither the persistence nor the defense of excess violence by governments in liberal democracies is surprising. Excess violence is better-called “human rights violations”—the language through which politics and activism most-directly engages government affronts on human dignity. To the extent that a government respects human rights, it also restricts the range of policy options available to itself for maintaining control of the state. All governments are repressive to some extent: According to the CIRI Human Rights Data Project, in 2010 only two countries out of its 193-country sample achieved a perfect score across all 14 different internationally recognized human rights rated (Cingranelli and Richards 2011). Furthermore, governments in liberal democracies (on which the book is focused) are constrained by relatively high degrees of respect for the various civil and political rights that make them liberal democracies. Consequently, it’s unsurprising a government would desire to maintain its privilege of violating various human rights as necessary to maintain a desired level and/or persistence in power. Second, it’s unsurprising a government would resist characterizing its own actions as constituting what it would consider to be “torture.” In May 2012, Granma, the official paper of the ruling Communist Party of Cuba, trumpeted the assertion “no torture or mistreatment has taken place in Cuba’s prisons since 1959” (Fortin 2012: para. 7). As far removed from reality as is this statement, the motive is clear: Admitting to torture is politically