Human rights researchers have discovered quantitative indicators and methods. As a result, for better or for worse, human rights research has joined the mainstream approach to social science research in the past decade. The systematic comparison of specific hypotheses, followed by controlled hypothesis testing using a range of indicators of rights now easily accessible in carefully constructed, well-vetted, widely and freely available datasets, is becoming an important mode for studying human rights. This has allowed both rights advocates as well as rights skeptics to plumb their conceptions of the causes and consequences of the international human rights regime.

The dedicated efforts of scholars, organizations and rights advocates to produce comparable, consistent and carefully constructed indicators for various aspects of human rights realizations has been a boon to research. Used carefully, critically and with an appreciation for its inherent limits, quantitative research has the potential to check whether understandings generated from case studies can be generalized. It can also suggest systematic ways in which our “theories” might be amended or conditioned. The purpose of this chapter is to review the relatively recent (and mostly quantitative) research in precisely this spirit. My focus is primarily on the arguments advanced over a decade ago in what at that time was one of the most carefully executed and theoretically motivated explorations of the relationship between international human rights norms and actual practices: the “spiral model” developed by Thomas Risse, Stephen Ropp and Kathryn Sikkink in The Power of Human Rights (1999; PoHR in the following). The first section sets out in brief the original elements of PoHR’s theory of how international human rights norms have practical effects on human rights practices. The second section compares the theoretical assumptions and causal claims of the spiral model with the last decade’s cascade of quantitative research. PoHR was fairly explicit about the conditions under which they expected human rights norms to influence outcomes, and the specific mechanisms through which normative change could take place.