ABSTRACT
Modeling the relationships among state capacity, state failure and rights requires suitable indicators for each. The challenges associated with identifying such indicators can be divided into three categories: the conceptual issue of what constitutes state failure, the related problem of operationalizing and measuring it, and the challenge of measuring human rights. As with state capacity, there is more than one way to measure human rights. There are two major sets of human rights data, the Political Terror Scale (PTS) and the Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Dataset. Civil and international wars have been found to be significant negative predictors of human rights abuse in earlier studies. This may reflect abuses by combatants against civilians, or the general breakdown of social control of violence that often takes place in wartime. Democracy has also been found to be a significant positive predictor of human rights conditions in numerous studies. Economic development may reduce competition over resources or raise the opportunity costs of conflicts.
