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There is an ongoing debate about whether human rights standards have changed over the last 30 years. The evidence for or against this shift relies upon indicators created by human coders reading the texts of human rights reports. To help resolve this debate, we suggest translating the question of changing standards into a supervised learning problem. From this perspective, the application of consistent standards over time implies a time-constant mapping from the textual features in reports to the human coded scores. Alternatively, if the meaning of abuses have evolved over time, then the same textual features will be labeled with different numerical scores at distinct times. Of course, while the mapping from natural language to numerical human rights score is a highly complicated function, we show that these two distinct data generation processes imply divergent overall patterns of accuracy when we train a wide variety of algorithms on older versus newer sets of observations to learn how to automatically label texts with scores. Our results are consistent with the expectation that standards of human rights have changed over time.

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How does natural resource wealth influence the duration of civil conflicts? We theorize that the exploitation of natural resources can strengthen rebels’ “power to resist” the government, but this depends on how rebels earn funding from those resources. Distinguishing between the extortion and smuggling of natural resources, we posit that smuggling in particular is more likely to give rebels the flexibility and mobility needed to effectively resist government repression. We then test this proposition empirically using new data that identify not only whether rebels profit from resources but also how they do so. We find that only when rebels smuggle natural resources do civil conflicts last significantly longer. In contrast, conflicts in which rebel groups earn money from extorting natural resource production are not significantly more likely to endure. This finding is of special interest because past work has largely ignored how rebels earn income from natural resources and the implication this distinction might have on conflict processes.