ABSTRACT

General Summary

Why do we observe different levels of respect for human rights in different regions of the same country? Furthermore, why are citizens? human rights generally uniformly protected (or abused) within the borders of some countries while within other countries these rights are generally upheld in some locations and severely restricted in others? Prior research investigating patterns of human rights protection and violation has typically treated states as centralized decision-makers and examined state respect for human rights as a single, countrywide phenomenon. This approach masks important variations in the actors perpetrating abuses, motives for the abuse, targets of the abuse, and severity of abuse. The PIs propose that cross-national human rights researchers must break their focus on the country as the unit of analysis and look at the sub-national characteristics of repressive behaviors. The PIs focus on three major factors: 1) antigovernment activity, 2) government decentralization, and 3) local government capacity. They argue that antigovernment dissent encourages government agents to respond with high levels of repression. However, this response is particularly likely when government power is highly decentralized, when the dissent takes place far from the national capital, and when the local government is largely incapable of controlling its repressive agents. The PIs collect the first dataset to document the level of repression at the subnational level for a global sample of countries. These data are likely to be used by government agencies, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, and others to engage in evidence-based policy and advocacy.

Technical Summary

While levels of state repression and the frequency, severity, and targets of human rights abuses vary spatially within states, most previous studies of these topics have only considered repression in the aggregate. This is problematic because it ignores variation in institutional structures and decision-making processes within countries. The PIs explain this subnational variation of repression within states. In particular, they focus on three major factors: antigovernment activity, government decentralization, and local state capacity. They develop a global dataset that captures violations of physical integrity rights by state agents at the level of the sub-national unit. For this project, the PIs rely on a mix of expert coding, theoretically informed measurement models, and computational techniques, which are capable of coding and then linking together the diverse information drawn from a set of primary source documents. Using this information, they generate standards-based measures for each of several specific types of physical integrity violations (arbitrary detention, torture, disappearances, and extrajudicial execution) as well as a combined indicator for these abuses for each first-order subnational administrative unit within a state. This level of analysis brings scholarship closer to the level at which most citizens encounter the government's legal, political, and bureaucratic authority.

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