AAAS Scientific Responsibility, Human Rights and Law Program

Economic and Political Explanations of Human Rights Violations


This research note aims to measure human rights conditions crossnationally and to account for variations in these conditions. The measure conceptualizes human rights along two dimensions: the imprisonment of political dissidents, and the killing and torture of prisoners. The authors apply these measures to 122 countries and attempt to account for variations in terms of several well-known economic and political hypotheses.