Respect for Human Rights has Improved Over Time: Modeling the Changing Standard of Accountability

TLDR

Indicators of political repression show no improvement over 35 years, yet the increasing stringency of monitors’ standards—searching harder, more places, and classifying more acts as abuse—creates the appearance of stagnation. The study argues that the apparent lack of progress reflects changing monitoring practices rather than stagnant human rights, and seeks to test this claim. A new theoretically informed measurement model is introduced that produces unbiased estimates of repression from existing data. The model reveals that respect for human rights has actually improved over time and that ratification of the UN Convention Against Torture is positively associated with higher human‑rights standards, contradicting earlier studies.

Abstract

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, like Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department, 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 this article, I present a new, theoretically informed measurement model, which generates unbiased estimates of repression using existing data. I then 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.