Relativizing Human Rights

Good neighbours matter: economic geography and the diffusion of human rights

“…This is consistent with other studies that provide strong evidence that richer countries supply their citizens with better rights protection (see, e.g. Mitchel and McCormick, 1988;Poe and Tate, 1994;Poe, Tate and Keith, 1999;Landman and Larizza, 2009;Landman et al 2012), but at the same time, there is weaker evidence that HR benefit economic growth (Blume and Voight, 2007; see also Norris 2012). Although we did not find a clear relationship between changes in HR and changes in GDP, this may indicate that the relationship between GDP and HR is a long-term one, not short-term in keeping with the social capital argument favoured by Sen.…”

“…In explaining this variation, the extant cross-national and quantitative literature on human rights has looked at socio-economic factors either explicitly (e.g. Mitchell and McCormick, 1988;Henderson, 1993;Heinisch, 1998;Abouharb and Cingranelli, 2007;Landman and Larizza, 2009;Landman, Kernohan, and Gohdes, 2012) or implicitly as control variables alongside different sets of social, political and cultural explanatory variables (e.g. Poe and Tate, 1994;Poe, Tate and Keith, 1999;Camp Keith, 2012).…”

Democracy and Human Rights: Concepts, Measures, and Relationships

“…There are strong and significant factor loadings ranging from .684 to .909 for each of five measures of human rights on a single extracted factor component that is common to all measure (see Landman & Larizza, 2009, p. 721). Figure 2 shows a scatter plot between the Polity IV measure of democracy and this human rights factor (see Landman, 2013, p. 39;Landman, Kernohan, & Gohdes, 2012;Landman & Larizza, 2009), where it is clear that there is a positive and significant re- lationship between the two measures (captured by the fitted line). It is also evident from Figure 2 that there is a significant number of countries that would qualify as 'illiberal democracies' sitting in the lower right quadrant (e.g.…”

Projecting Liberalism Into a Realist World: David P. Forsythe and the Political Science of Human Rights

“…For example, there are studies on the causal order and severity of repression (Cingranelli and Richards 1999), the trade-offs in using events-based, standards-based, survey-based and other measures of human rights (Jabine and Claude 1992;Green 2001;Landman and Carvalho 2009;, and the "relativity" of human rights protection itself (Landman, Kernohan, and Gohdes 2012). We learn that human rights are indeed a latent practice that is often obscured (perhaps like the "faces of power") and that different measurement strategies variously uncover different aspects of this latency.…”