Undergraduate Research Assistance: Data on Human Rights Violations.

这项研究解决了当今世界政治中四个明显重要的问题。当国家酷刑发生时，政府的哪个机构会施以酷刑？国家对酷刑指控的回应是什么？谁被折磨了？使用了哪些类型的酷刑？该项目解决了所有四个问题，但特别关注前两个问题。这项研究力求绘制出政治机构对酷刑做法的影响，特别是对消除酷刑这一做法的影响。建立这样的地图需要研究人员确定涉及的具体政府机构，并开始探索政治机构和具体政策对消除酷刑的影响。该项目利用大赦国际(AI)的报告收集数据，说明军队、警察、监狱官员和其他政府机构虐待或折磨在押人员的程度。该项目源于调查员S之前的研究发现，只有在没有团体使用暴力挑战政府的情况下，民主政府才比独裁政府更有可能消除酷刑的做法。这项研究还发现，体制上的三权分立降低了政府消除酷刑做法的可能性。虽然这项工作确定了政治机构和酷刑做法之间的重要联系，但由于现有关于各国政府在多大程度上未能履行其不酷刑义务的粗略数据，这项工作有限。在这位调查员之前由NSF资助的工作中，20多名本科生和几名研究生阅读了1995-2005年间人工智能的出版物，并对各种变量的数据进行了编码，这些变量涉及政府参与酷刑的程度，调查酷刑指控，并惩罚那些被判折磨囚犯的人。其结果是一个关于政府酷刑和虐待行为的大型数据库。这个新项目将收集的原始数据转换为用户友好的数据，可以在互联网上访问。原始数据正在被汇编成两种格式，其中一种在关于冲突、合作和人权的学术文献中被广泛使用，另一种正在越来越多地被接受为标准持有者的有价值的替代。将聘请本科生研究助理来执行这些任务的大部分。佛罗里达州立大学有一个本科生研究计划，确定、招募和培训学生参与教师研究，为追求荣誉论文做准备，并为他们提供有效申请研究生计划或寻求其他研究发挥作用的机会的背景。因此，该项目将通过为下一代研究人员提供本科经验，为国家科学基础设施的发展做出贡献。这个公开的、用户友好的数据库将作为研究人员和人权倡导者都感兴趣的各种其他分析的信息来源。

This research addresses four overarching questions of clear importance in world politics today. When state torture occurs, what agency of the government tortures? What is the state response to allegations of torture? Who is tortured? What types of torture are used? The project tackles all four questions, but is focused particularly on the first two. The research seeks to map the impact of political institutions on the practice of torture and especially upon the elimination of torture as a practice. Building such a map requires that the researchers identify the specific government agencies involved and begin to explore the impact of both political institutions and specific policies upon the elimination of torture. The project uses Amnesty International (AI) reports to collect data on the extent to which the military, police officers, prison officials, and other government agencies ill-treat or torture those in their custody. The project grew out of the investigator?s prior research finding that democracies were more likely than autocratic governments to eliminate the practice of torture only when there were no groups using violence to challenge the government. The study also found that institutional separation of powers made governments less likely to eliminate the practice of torture. Although this work identified important linkages between political institutions and the practice of torture, it was limited due to the crude data available about the extent to which governments fail to meet their obligation not to torture. In the investigator's prior NSF-funded work, more than 20 undergraduates and several graduate students read AI's publications for the years 1995-2005 and coded data on a wide variety of variables about the extent to which governments engaged in torture, investigated allegations of torture, and punished those found guilty of torturing prisoners. The result is a large database about the torture and ill-treatment practices of governments.This new project converts the raw data as collected into user-friendly data that can be accessed on the Internet. The raw data is being assembled into two formats, one of which is widely used throughout the scholarly literature on conflict, cooperation, and human rights, and the other of which is gaining increasing acceptance as a valuable alternative to the standard bearer. Undergraduate research assistants will be hired to perform the majority of these tasks. Florida State has an undergraduate research program that identifies, recruits, and trains students to participate in faculty research as preparation for pursuing honors theses and provides them with background to apply effectively to graduate programs or pursue other opportunities in which research plays a role. This project will thus contribute to the development of the nation's scientific infrastructure by providing the next generation of researchers with experience as undergraduates. The publicly available, user-friendly database will serve as a source of information for a variety of other analyses of interest to researchers and human rights advocates alike.