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Patterns of disagreement in indicators of state repression

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2019

Kevin L. Cope ,
Charles Crabtree Open the ORCID record for Charles Crabtree [Opens in a new window]  and
Christopher J. Fariss
Kevin L. Cope
Affiliation:
School of Law, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA
Charles Crabtree*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Christopher J. Fariss
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Until recently, researchers who wanted to examine the determinants of state respect for most specific negative rights (i.e., physical integrity and empowerment rights) needed to rely on data from the CIRI or the Political Terror Scale (PTS). The new Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset offers scholars a potential alternative to the individual human rights variables from CIRI. We analyze a set of key Cingranelli–Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Data Project and V-Dem negative rights indicators, finding unusual and unexpectedly large patterns of disagreement between the two sets. First, we discuss the new V-Dem dataset by comparing it to the disaggregated CIRI indicators, discussing the history of each project, and describing its empirical domain. Second, we identify a set of disaggregated human rights measures that are similar across the two datasets and discuss each project’s measurement approach. Third, we examine how these measures compare to each other empirically, showing that they diverge considerably across both time and space. These findings point to several important directions for future work, such as how conceptual approaches and measurement strategies affect rights scores. For the time being, our findings suggest that researchers should think carefully about using the measures as substitutes.

Type
Research Notes
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , January 2020 , pp. 178 - 187
Copyright
Copyright © The European Political Science Association 2019 

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