Talk given at the Centre of Governance and Human Rights. The paper proposed a method for ranking country human rights performance that takes into account the performance of countries on a host of variables that are related to the protection of civil and political rights. The method involves two stages. The first stage employs principal component factor analysis to five different standards-based measures of civil and political rights to extract a single human rights ‘factor score’. This human rights ‘factor score’ is then regressed on a collection of explanatory variables for the protection of civil and political rights and saves the residual as an indicator of the ‘over’ or ‘under’ performance of countries with respect to the protection of those rights. Both the ‘factor score’ and the residual score allow for a comparison of expected and actual human rights performance that leads to alternative rankings that we believe will be interest to scholars and practitioners working in the field of human rights.

1. Professor Todd Landman
Director, Institute for Democracy and Conflict Resolution
“The Comparative Politics of
Human Rights”
February 09 2011
POLIS

2. Rela%vising Human Rights
A New System for Country Ranking
Professor Todd Landman
Director
Institute for Democracy and Conflict Resolution, IDCR
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester, Essex CO4 3SQ
United Kingdom

3. Paper presented at the 2010 Annual Mee%ng of the American
Poli%cal Science Associa%on
Washington DC
Todd Landman David Kernohan Anita Gohdes
Professor of Government Head of Department Researcher
Department of Government Department for Economics & Benetech Ini%a%ve
University of Essex Sta%s%cs 480 S. California Ave.
Wivenhoe Park Middlesex University Suite 201
Colchester Hendon Palo Alto
Essex CO4 3SQ London NW4 4BT California 94306‐1609
UNITED KINGDOM UNITED KINGDOM UNITED STATES
todd@essex.ac.uk D.Kernohan@mdx.ac.uk anita.gohdes@googlemail.com
This paper is part of a larger project en%tled
The Poli6cal Economy of Human Rights

4. Outline of the presenta%on
• Introduc%on
• Exis%ng measures of human rights
• A factor index of human rights performance
• Modelling human rights performance
• Rela%vising human rights
• The way forward

5. Introduc%on
• 30 years of developing human rights measures
• Rising demand for human rights measures
• Global compara%ve analysis
– Narrow set of rights
– One form of measurement
• Absolute coding versus rela%ve assessment
• Propose a way to rela%vise the measurement of
human rights performance
– Uses exis%ng measures

6. Exis%ng measures of human rights
• Events‐based
• Standards‐based
• Survey‐based
• Socio‐economic and administra%ve
sta%s%cs

7. Standards‐based measures of
human rights
• Freedom House
– Poli%cal Rights
– Civil Liber%es
• Poli%cal Terror Scale
– Amnesty Interna%onal
– US State Department
• Torture Scale
– US State Department
• Cingranelli and Richards (CIRI)
– US State Department

8. Correla%on of scales

9. Factor index of human rights

10. Factor index distribu%on

11. Modelling human rights performance
• Cross na%onal varia%on
– 160 countries
– 1980‐2004
• Variables
– Poli%cal
– Economic
– Control
• Methods of es%ma%on

12. Income inequality (‐)
Land inequality (‐)
Human rights protec%on
Controls (civil and physical integrity rights)
Level of democracy (+)
Ethnic fragmenta%on (‐)
Domes%c conflict (‐)
Economic development (+)
Popula%on size (‐)
Landman and Larizza (2009) ‘Inequality and Human Rights: Who Controls
What When and How,’ International Studies Quarterly

13. Rela%vising human rights
Human rights Error
performance ‘unexplained
variance’
Constant Explanatory
Co-efficients
• Magnitude
variables
• Direction
• Significance

14. Yit
High Yit-Ŷ > 0 [human rights over achiever]
Ŷ [expected human rights protection]
Protection of human rights
Yjt-Ŷ < 0 [human rights under achiever]
Yjt
Low
Low Explanatory variables High
(X1-Xn)

15. Global trends

16. Regional trends

17. OECD countries

18. Eastern Europe

19. La%n America

20. Asia

21. Sub‐Saharan Africa

22. Middle East

24. The way forward
• Refine and extend the modelling
– Gravity modelling
– Run thorough robustness checks
• Combine with GIS for visualisa%on
• Develop a formal model
– Public goods
– The ‘market’ for human rights
• Publish and commercialise the research

25. Thank you!
www.idcr.org.uk
www.todd‐landman.com