The Political Terror Scale (PTS): A Re-introduction and a Comparison to CIRI

Abstract

Despite the frequency with which scholars have utilized the Political Terror Scale (PTS), a surprising number of questions remain regarding the origins of the scale, the coding scheme it employs, and its conceptualization of "state terror." This research note attempts to clarify these issues. We also take this opportunity to compare the PTS with the Cingranelli and Richards Human Rights Data Project (CIRI). Although the PTS and CIRI are coded from the same source material and capture the same class of human rights violations, we observe some important differences between the two that we believe may be of interest to scholars in the quantitative human rights community. First, we believe that the CIRI claims a level of precision that is not possible given the source data from which both datasets are coded. We believe that the PTS offers a transparent coding system that recognizes the inherent limitations in measuring abuses of physical integrity rights. Second, we argue that the CIRI's method of summing across abuse types leads to some inappropriate categorizations. For instance, the absence of one type of abuse prevents a state from being coded into a more repressive overall category regardless of the levels of other types of abuse. Lastly, the PTS accounts for the "range" of violence committed by the state—in short, what segments of the population are targeted. We believe that range is an important dimension to consider in measuring human rights and one to which CIRI does not attend.

Dynamic Patterns of Human Rights Practices

“…20 Log-likelihood comparisons are sufficient for evaluating the relative fit of the models, since the models have the same dependent variable and the same number of parameters. 21 See Cingranelli and Richards (2010), Wood and Gibney (2010) and more recently Clark and Sikkink (Forthcoming). At the same time, our approach provides the advantage of utilizing a disaggregated data source that allows empirical assessment of unidimensionality and places the aggregation of indicators under the control of the researcher, thus allowing for greater transparency in both measurement and testing.…”

“…If we had the separate scores for the coders we would be able to use this information to further improve our proposed model. 7 See, for example, Clark and Sikkink forthcoming; Wood and Gibney 2010. model comparison techniques we describe below. In the next subsection, we introduce the data and the justification for our proposed dynamic measurement model (DO-IRT).…”

Does the Political Environment Affect Inflows of Foreign Direct Investment? Evidence from Emerging Markets

“…12 The Political Terror Scale measures levels of political violence and terror that a country experiences in a particular year based on a 5-level "terror scale", from 0 (rule of law, no political murders or political prisoners) to 5 (terror expended to the whole population -murders, disappearances and torture are a common part of life). The resulting score is the arithmetic mean of outputs from Amnesty International and the US State Department (Wood and Gibney, 2010). 13 The CPI concept has been published since 1995 and currently covers 175 countries (2013).…”

U.S. Presence and the Incidence of Conflict

“…A third measure uses State Department reports to score states on specific types of repression then generates a final score by combining these separate factors; we run our models on these datasets as a robustness check on our results, as discussed later in the chapter; Wood and Gibney, 2010;Cingranelli and Richards, 2010. incumbent regime, have a clear organizational structure, and include at least 1,000 participants. 4 Groups' goals are described as maximalist if they pursue major political change, such as regime turnover or secession.…”