ABSTRACT

Countries around the world differ substantially in their efforts to live up to human rights standards. Some countries are improving more rapidly than others. Why? What explains why some countries do better than others? To answer both questions, a comparative study is needed with quantitative measures of human rights and one or more theoretical explanations. Quantitative studies of worldwide human rights observance, to be useful, should raise five questions:

Are there reliable and valid indicators of human rights performance?

Is the concept of human rights unidimensional or is the concept so broad that there are empirically identifiable subsets of human rights?

Do certain variables predict to varying degrees of human rights performance?

How can predictors of human rights attainments be explained theoretically?

What are the implications of the empirical evidence for policymakers?