minority rights

From Assimilation to Multiculturalism

From Assimilation to Multiculturalism: Changing Models of Majority-Minority Relationships in National Constitutions, 1789-2015 Ever since the emergence of the nation-state model in the late eighteenth century, many polities have pursued congruence between political and cultural units. As popular sovereignty became the main source of legitimacy in Western polities, centralized governmental projects to promote a national culture engulfed peripheral ones to produce increasingly homogeneous nations throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Measuring human rights organization activity

Measuring human rights organization activity: A new dataset of over 120,000 press releases and 40 million social media posts Human rights organizations (HROs) occupy a central position in theoretical and empirical work on social control, human rights, and repression. The literature argues that HROs play a large role in shaping rights practices across countries. According to this view, HROs primarily influence rights practices by naming and shaming the abuses of rights violators via public pronouncements.

The contours of human rights advocacy

The contours of human rights advocacy: Evidence from over 120,000 press releases issued by human rights organizations, 1996-2018 Have human rights improved across the globe? The answer to this fundamental question has considerable consequences for international and domestic policy and for how we understand the world around us. In this paper, we demonstrate why prior efforts to address this question provide biased answers. We then introduce a unique corpus of over 120,000 press releases from 10 international human rights organizations (HROs) that covers the years 1996-2018.

Microfoundations of human rights support

Examining the microfoundations of human rights support: Evidence from the U.S. and Canada When are individuals likely to support human rights? We argue that public support is a function of the perceived costs of rights and the level of international acceptance of those rights. If human rights policies are framed as either less costly to a country’s economic security or more beneficial to creating desired outcomes, support is more likely.