Measuring Mutual Dependence Between State Repressive Actions

This study explores the relationships between state violations of different human rights. Though most quantitative studies in international relations treat different types of repressive behaviors as either independent or arising from the same underlying process, significant insights are gained by conceptualizing different human rights violations as separate but dependent processes. We present a theoretical framework for conceptualizing the mechanisms relating human rights practices and produce a novel measurement strategy based on network analysis for exploring these relationships. We illustrate high levels of complementarity between most human rights practices. Substitution effects, in contrast, are occasionally substantial but relatively rare. Finally, using empirically informed Monte Carlo analyses, we present predictions regarding likely sequences of rights violations resulting in extreme violations of different physical integrity rights

Human Rights and the Strategic Use of US Foreign Food Aid

How does respect for human rights affect the disbursement of food aid by US foreign policymakers? Scholars analyzing foreign aid generally look at only total economic aid, military aid or a combination of both. However, for a more nuanced understanding of human rights as a determinant of foreign aid, the discrete foreign aid programs must be examined. By disentangling component-programs from total aid, this analysis demonstrates how human rights influence policymakers by allowing them to distribute food aid to human rights abusing countries. Consequently, policymakers can promote strategic objectives with food aid, while legally restricted from distributing other aid. The primary theoretical argument, which links increasing human rights abuse with increasing food aid, is supported by results from a Heckman model. This procedure models the two-stage decision-making process where foreign policymakers first, select countries for aid and then, distribute aid to those selected

Yahtzee: An Anonymized Group Level Matching Procedure

Researchers often face the problem of needing to protect the privacy of subjects while also needing to integrate data that contains personal information from diverse data sources. The advent of computational social science and the enormous amount of data about people that is being collected makes protecting the privacy of research subjects ever more important. However, strict privacy procedures can hinder the process of joining diverse sources of data that contain information about specific individual behaviors. In this paper we present a procedure to keep information about specific individuals from being leaked\u27\u27 or shared in either direction between two sources of data without need of a trusted third party. To achieve this goal, we randomly assign individuals to anonymous groups before combining the anonymized information between the two sources of data. We refer to this method as the Yahtzee procedure, and show that it performs as predicted by theoretical analysis when we apply it to data from Facebook and public voter records

An Active Learning Seminar and Sequential Research Project Experience

I present two key components from a course designed to introduce undergraduate students to human rights: a set of group-based active learning tasks and an individual-based sequential research project. In the classroom, active learning opportunities allow students to creatively and collectively engage with course material. The sequential research project is a step-by-step guide for creating an original research paper. For the two components, the students draw from a set of primary source documents combined with additional readings to build knowledge in the classroom. With this new knowledge, the students generate ideas and content that they use to write a sequence of research essays about that course topic outside the classroom. In this manuscript, I describe the shared structure of the two learning components, discuss details about each of the sequential essays, present assessment data, and provide suggestions about how to adapt the course to other social science topics

The More Things Stay the Same the More They Change : : Measuring Changing Levels of Human Rights Using Computational Methods

According to indicators of political repression currently used by scholars, human rights practices have not improved over the past 35 years, despite the spread of human rights norms, better monitoring, and the increasing prevalence of electoral democracy. I argue that this empirical pattern is not an indication of stagnating human rights practices. Instead, it reflects a systematic change in the way monitors encounter and interpret information about abuses. The standard of accountability used to assess state behaviors becomes more stringent as monitors look harder for abuse, look in more places for abuse, and classify more acts as abuse. In chapter 1, I present a new, theoretically informed measurement model, which generates unbiased estimates of repression. I also show that respect for human rights has improved over time and that the relationship between human rights respect and ratification of the UN Convention Against Torture is positive, which contradicts findings from existing research. In chapter 2, I demonstrate other modeling techniques for measuring human rights. In chapter 3, I demonstrate that the ratification of human rights treaties is empirically associated with higher levels of respect for human rights over time and across countries. This positive relationship is robust to a variety of measurement strategies and model specifications. Overall, a new picture emerges of improving levels of respect for human rights, which coincides with the increasing embeddedness of countries within the international human rights regime. In chapter 4, I extend the model and estimate the distribution of the number of individuals killed for each country-year observation in one of the original event-based datasets. The model explicitly accounts for the uncertainty inherent in counting this type of difficult to observe event. To validate the new model, I focus on one dataset, which defines one-sided government killing as government caused deaths of non-combatant

Replication data for: The Strategic Substitution of United States Foreign Aid

I present a foreign policy decision-making theory that accounts for why US food aid is used strategically when other more powerful economic aid tools are at the disposal of policy makers. I focus my analysis on US food aid because this aid program provides an excellent case with which to test for the empirical existence of foreign policy substitution. Substitution is an important assumption of many foreign policy theories yet proves to be an allusive empirical phenomenon to observe. Central to this analysis is the identification of legal mechanisms such as the "needy people" provision in the US foreign aid legislation that legally restrict certain types of aid; this mechanism however, does allow for the allocation of certain types of foreign aid, such as food aid, to human rights abusing regimes. Thus, I test if food aid is used as a substitute for human rights abusing states while methodologically accounting for other aid options. The empirical results, estimated with a multinomial logit and Heckman model, demonstrate that countries with high levels of human rights abuse are (1) more likely to receive food aid and (2) receive greater amounts of food aid even when controlling for other economic aid, the conditioning effect of strategic interests and humanitarian need over the period 1990-2004