This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: When it comes to human rights, it probably won't surprise you that Scandinavian countries perform well by statistical measures, along with Canada and Australia. But did you know that Mozambique, the Philippines, and Rwanda are also considered "overperformers," meaning that they score higher on human rights than expected?
A new book co-written by researchers at Binghamton University and the University of Rhode Island provides a framework for comparing human rights practices around the world and over time and identifies overachieving and underachieving nations. The book, "Science and the Study of Human Rights," by Binghamton University professors David L. Cingranelli and Mikhail Filippov and University of Rhode Island associate professors Skip Mark and Ashlea Rundlett, also evaluates barriers to improvement and ranks countries around the world on a variety of human rights measures.
"I say this to my classes: If you don't measure something, the impression is that you don't care about it," said SUNY Distinguished Professor of Political Science Cingranelli, co-director of Binghamton's Human Rights Institute (HRI). "Once you attach numbers to things, you can do all kinds of research that is considered scientific because it uses quantitative methods that are transparent and replicable." The book is part of SUNY Press' Human Rights series, which is edited by Cingranelli and Binghamton University English professor Alexandra Moore, HRI co-director. Cingranelli, Mark and Cornell University postdoctoral scholar P.
DeAnne Roark are currently working on another book in the series, "Forecasting and Preventing Mass Atrocities." The field of human rights has historically hinged on case studies rather than statistical data. However, improving human rights research, policy analysis and public understanding requires systematic evidence. In the book, the authors introduce a range of publicly available human rights indicators, with particular attention to the CIRIGHTS Data Project, directed by Cingranelli, Mark and Filippov.
The largest data set of its kind in the world, CIRIGHTS provides numerical scores that show how well every country protects—or doesn't protect—a wide range of internationally recognized human rights. On a scale of zero to 100, the average human rights score for governments was just 70, according to their most recent analysis. The United States performed even lower, at 62.5.
In terms of human rights, democracies perform better than nondemocracies, and rich countries typically outperform poorer ones. Some nations, however, buck the expected trends; the book weighs countries' structural and historical barriers to human rights and names these overachievers and underachievers. Some countries couldn't be included in the achievement assessment because they lacked information on variables used in the models, including the United States, North Korea, Germany, South Sudan, Venezuela and eight others.
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