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. A quantitative study of worldwide human rights observance raises five questions. (1) Are there reliable and valid indicators of human rights performance? (2) Is the concept of human rights unidimensional or is the concept so broad that there are empirically identifiable subsets of human rights? (3) Do certain variables predict to varying degrees of human rights performance? (4) How can predictors of human rights attainments be explained theoretically? (5) What are the implications of the empirical evidence for policymakers? All five questions are answered below.
