Todd Landman

Measuring Human Rights: Principle, Practice and Policy

This paper demonstrates why human rights measurement is important, how human rights have been measured to date, and how such measures can be improved in the future. Through focusing primarily but not exclusively on the measurement of civil and political rights, the paper argues that human rights can be measured in principle, in practice, and as outcomes of government policy. Such measures include the coding of formal legal documents, events-based, standards-based, and survey-based data, as well as aggregate indicators that serve as indirect measures of rights protection. The paper concludes by stressing the need for continued provision of high quality information at the lowest level of aggregation, sharing information and developing an ethos of replication, and long term investment in data collection efforts.

Measuring Human Rights

1. Introduction 2. The Content of Human Rights 3. Measuring Human Rights 4. Events-Based Measures 5. Standards-Based Measures 6. Survey-Based Measures 7. Socio-Economic and Administrative Statistics 8. Conclusion

Social media and protest mobilization: evidence from the Tunisian revolution

This article explores how social media acted as a catalyst for protest mobilization during the Tunisian revolution in late 2010 and early 2011. Using evidence from protests we argue that social media acted as an important resource for popular mobilization against the Ben Ali regime. Drawing on insights from “resource mobilization theory”, we show that social media (1) allowed a “digital elite” to break the national media blackout through brokering information for mainstream media; (2) provided a basis for intergroup collaboration for a large “cycle of protest”; (3) reported event magnitudes that raised the perception of success for potential free riders, and (4) provided additional “emotional mobilization” through depicting the worst atrocities associated with the regimes response to the protests. These findings are based on background talks with Tunisian bloggers and digital activists and a revealed preference survey conducted among a sample of Tunisian internet users (February–May 2012).

Comparative Politics and Human Rights

The academic study of human rights since the 1948 UN Declaration has flourished considerably, a process that has increasingly involved a variety of disciplines from the legal, social, and human sciences including traditional and critical legal studies, political science, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, psychology, economics and environmental sciences. Despite the claim and desire to make the study of human rights truly interdisciplinary, much work is still needed in examining the contribution that particular disciplines can make to understanding key issues in the field. Within political science, normative and empirical studies seek to establish the rational, cultural, and structural foundations for human rights, their possible relationships with democracy, and the key factors that help explain the global variation in their protection. The field of comparative politics has much to contribute to this important area of research both in substantive and methodological terms. Comparative politics fits well with the theory and practice of human rights because it is based upon the cross-cultural comparison of individual nation states in an effort to explain and understand the different ways in which

The Political Science of Human Rights

Human rights have long been a direct or indirect substantive topic in modern political science and, in particular, the study of human rights represents an important nexus between traditional concerns within comparative politics and those in international relations. On the one hand, comparative politics has traditionally been concerned with the functions, determinants and outcomes of different political regimes, political institutions, political culture, the relationship between states and citizens (protest and repression, social mobilization and citizenship rights, voting, elections and party systems), and large social processes such as social and political revolutions, democratization and the domestic effects of and responses to globalization. On the other hand, international relations has concentrated on the inter-state dynamics of war, peace and security; international trade, finance and development; the growth and role of international organizations; the proliferation and effectiveness of international regimes and foreign policy analysis. More recently, attention has focused on the interplay between domestic and international politics in examining the ways in which domestic political arrangements may have an impact on the international behaviour of states. The now famous notion of the ‘two-level’ game has been instructive for scholars examining the constraint of democratic institutions on state behaviour, while the large literature on the ‘democratic’ and ‘Kantian’ peace has used the tools of modern political science to examine the degree to which democracy and other ‘liberal’ variables have an inhibiting effect on the likelihood of interstate violence. The study of human rights within modern political science fits neatly into these disciplinary developments. The history of human rights is one of the increasing internationalization of an idea that has traditionally been defended nationally.

Constitutional Design and Democratic Performance

The article examines the relationship between constitutional design and democratic performance. To do so, it draws on a new data set, containing measures of eight core values of liberal democratic government (accountability, representation, constraint, participation, political rights, civil rights, property rights, minority rights) for 40 country cases over 29 years. It uses pooled cross section time-series regressions to explore the effects of executive-legislative relations, electoral rules and federal-unitary government, while controlling for the contextual conditions of economic wealth, political culture, and the longevity of democratic government itself. The article reviews previous attempts to explore the relationship in order to sharpen the definition of democratic performance, explore key aspects of the research design, and compare the statistical results with the present state of our knowledge. Overall the results tend to support the superior performance of parliamentary over presidential systems, and, in lesser degree, of unitary over federal systems. The performance profiles of proportional representation and plurality electoral systems, on the other hand, appear as distinct but quite evenly matched. But reasons are given for exercising some care with causal inferences, and for applying the results to closer-focus comparative institutional analysis.

Economic Development and Democracy: the View from Latin America

This article provides a robust empirical test of the economic development thesis using time-series data on seventeen Latin American countries (n = 408). It specifies similar models (both linear and non-linear) to those found in the global comparative literature on economic development and democracy in an effort to replicate their findings at the regional level. The statistical analysis shows that the positive relationship between economic development and democracy is not upheld at this level, even when using alternative measures of both and controlling for sub-regional variation. Overall, the analysis provides a regional ‘most likely’ study that infirms the main claims of modernization theory.

Introduction: New Directions in Social Science

There is ferment in the social sciences. After years of sustained effort to build a science of society modelled on the natural sciences, that project, long treated with suspicion by some, is now openly being rethought. A critical intervention in this period of reflection was Making Social Science Matter (MSSM) by Bent Flyvbjerg, published in 2001. In that book Flyvbjerg challenged the very idea of social science as a science modelled on the natural sciences. Flyvbjerg argued that, as the social sciences study human interactions that involve human consciousness, volition, power and reflexivity, attempts to build generalizable, predictive models such as those for the natural world are misplaced and even futile.

Evolution of Maya Polities in the Ancient Mesoamerican System

The analysis of politics in antiquity presents new opportunities for political science and international relations, particularly the ancient New World (c. 2000 B.C. to A.D. 1521). Governance through leadership and institutions, collective action, war and peace, alliance dynamics, regional hegemonies, interstate rivalries, and other universal patterns of world politics existed in Meso-America, antedating the modern state system. We report findings from a study to record systematically the rise and fall of Maya polities in the Meso-American political system, using sources from archaeology and epigraphy. Based on tests of competing hypotheses and new distribution statistics and hazard rates (survival analysis) for 72 Maya polities, our findings support a model of Maya political dynamics based on pre-classic origins, punctuated phases of development, multiple cycles of system expansion and collapse, and weaker political stability for increasingly complex polities. We draw two main implications: (a) a new theory of the Maya political collapse(s), based on their failure to politically integrate; and (b) confirmation for a new periodization of Maya political evolution, different from the traditional cultural periodization, based on several cycles of rise-and-fall, not just one. Our findings may also make possible future investigations in areas such as the war-polarity and war-alliances hypotheses.

Individual Rights and Social Movements: A Comparative and Statistical Inquiry

This article is a comparative study of the relationship between social movements and the individual rights of citizenship. It identifies three main connections between collective action and individual rights made in theory and history, and analyses them in the context of modern authoritarian regimes. It does so by measuring both social mobilization and the presence of rights over time in Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Spain, and analyses their mutual impact statistically – both within and across these national cases. The results demonstrate the mutual impact between rights and movements, and more importantly, constitute a robust defence of democracy as the direct result of collective struggles for individual rights.