Latest Resources
Quantitative Human Rights Indicators: a survey of major initiatives
Article / Working Paper, Human Rights, Academic/Think TankThis paper was prepared for the 2005 Nordic Network Seminar in Human Rights Research. It provides an overview and assessment of some major attempts and approaches to develop quantitative human rights and related indicators that have been recently used for human rights monitoring. A major objective of the paper is to show the depth and scale of information and indicators that have been used by...
Economic and Social Rights Fulfillment Index: Country Scores and Rankings
Article / Working Paper, Human Rights, Academic/Think TankBuilding on previously proposed methodology for an index of economic and social rights fulfillment, this paper presents country scores and rankings based on the Economic and Social Rights Fulfillment Index (ESRF Index). Unlike socio-economic indicators, which are often used as proxies for the extent to which rights-holders enjoy economic and social rights, the ESRF Index incorporates...
Social protection in sub-Saharan Africa: Will the green shoots blossom?
Africa, Article / Working Paper, Human Rights, Academic/Think TankThis paper provides an overview of the recent extension of social protection in sub- Saharan Africa. It identifies two main ‘models’ of social protection in the region: the Southern Africa and Middle Africa models. It then assesses the contrasting policy processes behind these models and examines the major challenges they face as regards financing, institutional capacity and...
Foreign Direct Investment and Civil Rights: Testing Decreasing Returns to Civil Rights
Article / Working Paper, Democracy, Europe and CIS, Human Rights, Justice, Latin America and the Carribean, Academic/Think TankIn this paper, the effectiveness of improvements in political and civil rights for attracting foreign direct investment flows (FDI) into democracies is examined. The author contends that advances in the quality of democracy – specifically those concerning civil rights – present positive but decreasing marginal returns in attracting FDI inflows. This is empirically proven by using...
Response to ‘What do the Worldwide Governance Indicators Measure?
Article / Working Paper, Civil Society, Human Rights, Justice, Public Administration, Academic/Think TankThis article, published in the European Journal for Development Research is a response to the article “What do the Worldwide Governance Indicators Measure?” by M. Thomas (2009) where he dismisses the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) as an ‘elaborate and unsupported hypothesis’ because of the failure to demonstrate the ‘construct validity’...
What Do the Worldwide Governance Indicators Measure?
Article / Working Paper, Civil Society, Human Rights, Justice, Academic/Think TankThis journal article from the European Journal of Development Research discusses the ‘construct validity’ of qualitative measurement techniques that policymakers and researchers use, as they focus more on the question of the impact of governance in economic development. A number of measures of the quality of governance have been created. Among these are the...
Ethnic Structure, Inequality and Governance in the Public Sector in Switzerland
Article / Working Paper, Europe and CIS, Human Rights, Political Parties, Public Administration, Other UN AgencyThe paper begins with a description of the ethnic structures and cleavages in Switzerland and their development. It then provides an overview of the Swiss political system and its institutional elements of political integration. Finally, the scope and limits of these arrangements are discussed through an analysis of their effects on minority representation and equality. Switzerland is one of...
Beyond statistics: Measuring education as a human right
Article / Working Paper, Human Rights, Public Administration, Academic/Think TankThe Right to Education Project’s indicators use the categories of the 4A scheme (Availability, Accessibility, Acceptability and Adaptability), while making Governance a fifth category, to ensure the State's direct compliance with international and national legislation. In addition, the indicators are accessible through three cross-cutting horizontal principles: non-discrimination...
Measuring Elusive Populations with Bayesian Model Averaging for Multiple Systems Estimations: A Case Study on Lethal Violations
Article / Working Paper, Human Rights, Latin America and the Carribean, Academic/Think TankCollecting data for the analysis of past human rights violations is fraught with challenges. For example, individuals from or about whom data should be collected may be displaced, missing, or dead. Some reports of acts may be easier to find than others, and as a result, datasets will be biased toward those cases. These challenges must be overcome in order to create effective official policy for...