In the last post, I presented some basic facts about the data you gathered to argue that it was generally reliable. Your data was generally correlated with existing professional measures of democracy, and there were no clear cases of countries where the judgment of POLS209 was too different from that of other well known datasets on democracy.
In this post, I’ll show you a few comparisons with human rights data gathered by other researchers to try to answer the general question of whether there’s any correlation between how democratic a country is, and how well it respects human rights.
One point to note before beginning. If you define democracy to encompass respect for human rights, then of course “more democracy” will by definition mean more respect for human rights. But the POLS209 measure of democracy I constructed fom your answers does not include things like torture or equal respect for rights, so the answer to the research question for this class is not necessarily a matter of definition.
The first graph I want to show you is a simple scatter plot of the Human Rights Scores created by Chris Fariss against the POLS209 measure of democracy (see below). Chris Fariss’ Human Rights scores are constructed from a number of other human rights scores created by different people that measure violations of physical integirty rights (things like torture, politically motivated disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and political imprisonment); in theory (the actual details are complicated), these scores should represent a basic quantitative measure of how much, or how strongly, these basic rights of “political integrity” are respected or violated. In this scale, “0” represents the mean level of violations in a sample of 202 countries from 1949-2013; a country scoring a “2” is 2 standard deviations better than the countries in the sample (so it has many fewer violations of rights), and a country scoring a “-2” is, by contrast, two standard deviations worse. Here’s the figure:
As we can see, democratic countries seem to score a bit better on this measure than non-democratic countries, but the range is quite wide. Some countries on the democratic end of the scale score quite poorly in at least some years, while some countries on the non-democratic end of the scale score reasonably well (though highly non-democratic countries rarely score above 0, indicating very poor human rights records). What might be going on here?
Here’s the same figure but looking at the measures of militarism, personalism, and totalitarianism you researched.
More militarism, personalism, and totalitarianism are clearly associated with worse human rights scores in the Fariss measure.
The same pattern is visible if we use the V-Dem “Polyarchy” scores (which have much longer coverage than the POLS209 democracy scores) instead of your measures:
Again, the broad pattern is clear, but specific countries vary widely. Nevertheless, it is possible to say that highly democratic countries appear to be much more likely to respect physical integrity rights than highly non-democratic ones.
More graphs and analysis tomorrow, looking at other rights (including some rights having to do with education).
In this post, I’ll show you a few comparisons with human rights data gathered by other researchers to try to answer the general question of whether there’s any correlation between how democratic a country is, and how well it respects human rights.
One point to note before beginning. If you define democracy to encompass respect for human rights, then of course “more democracy” will by definition mean more respect for human rights. But the POLS209 measure of democracy I constructed fom your answers does not include things like torture or equal respect for rights, so the answer to the research question for this class is not necessarily a matter of definition.
The first graph I want to show you is a simple scatter plot of the Human Rights Scores created by Chris Fariss against the POLS209 measure of democracy (see below). Chris Fariss’ Human Rights scores are constructed from a number of other human rights scores created by different people that measure violations of physical integirty rights (things like torture, politically motivated disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and political imprisonment); in theory (the actual details are complicated), these scores should represent a basic quantitative measure of how much, or how strongly, these basic rights of “political integrity” are respected or violated. In this scale, “0” represents the mean level of violations in a sample of 202 countries from 1949-2013; a country scoring a “2” is 2 standard deviations better than the countries in the sample (so it has many fewer violations of rights), and a country scoring a “-2” is, by contrast, two standard deviations worse. Here’s the figure:
As we can see, democratic countries seem to score a bit better on this measure than non-democratic countries, but the range is quite wide. Some countries on the democratic end of the scale score quite poorly in at least some years, while some countries on the non-democratic end of the scale score reasonably well (though highly non-democratic countries rarely score above 0, indicating very poor human rights records). What might be going on here?
Here’s the same figure but looking at the measures of militarism, personalism, and totalitarianism you researched.
More militarism, personalism, and totalitarianism are clearly associated with worse human rights scores in the Fariss measure.
The same pattern is visible if we use the V-Dem “Polyarchy” scores (which have much longer coverage than the POLS209 democracy scores) instead of your measures:
Again, the broad pattern is clear, but specific countries vary widely. Nevertheless, it is possible to say that highly democratic countries appear to be much more likely to respect physical integrity rights than highly non-democratic ones.
More graphs and analysis tomorrow, looking at other rights (including some rights having to do with education).
No comments:
Post a Comment