Collaborative Research: Sub-national Analysis of Repression Project

为什么在同一个国家的不同地区，我们对人权的尊重程度不同？此外，为什么公民是？人权在一些国家境内普遍受到统一保护(或滥用)，而在其他国家境内，这些权利在一些地方得到普遍维护，在另一些地方受到严格限制？以前调查人权保护和侵犯行为模式的研究通常将国家视为集中的决策者，并将国家对人权的尊重作为一种单一的全国现象进行审查。这种方法掩盖了实施虐待行为的行为人、虐待动机、虐待目标和虐待严重程度的重要差异。PIS建议，跨国人权研究人员必须打破以国家为分析单位的重点，着眼于镇压行为的次国家特征。PIs关注三个主要因素：1)反政府活动，2)政府权力下放，3)地方政府能力。他们认为，反政府的异议鼓励政府机构以高水平的镇压作为回应。然而，当政府权力高度分散、异议发生在远离首都的地方、地方政府在很大程度上无法控制其镇压力量时，这种反应尤其有可能。私人投资机构收集了第一个数据集，以记录全球国家样本在国家以下一级的压制程度。这些数据可能被政府机构、国际组织、非政府组织和其他人用来从事循证政策和倡导。技术摘要尽管国家镇压的程度以及侵犯人权的频率、严重程度和目标在国家内部存在空间差异，但以前对这些主题的大多数研究只考虑了总体上的镇压。这是有问题的，因为它忽视了国家内部体制结构和决策过程的差异。PI解释了国家内部镇压的这种次国家差异。特别是，他们关注三个主要因素：反政府活动、政府权力下放和地方政府能力。他们开发了一个全球数据集，捕获国家特工在地方单位一级侵犯人身完整权利的行为。对于这个项目，绩效指标依赖于专家编码、理论上知情的测量模型和计算技术的组合，这些技术能够对从一组主要来源文件中提取的各种信息进行编码，然后将它们联系在一起。利用这些信息，他们为几种具体类型的侵犯人身完整行为(任意拘留、酷刑、失踪和法外处决)中的每一种制定了基于标准的措施，并为一个国家内每个一级国家以下行政单位制定了这些侵犯行为的综合指标。这种水平的分析使学术水平更接近于大多数公民遇到政府的法律、政治和官僚权威的水平。

General SummaryWhy do we observe different levels of respect for human rights in different regions of the same country? Furthermore, why are citizens? human rights generally uniformly protected (or abused) within the borders of some countries while within other countries these rights are generally upheld in some locations and severely restricted in others? Prior research investigating patterns of human rights protection and violation has typically treated states as centralized decision-makers and examined state respect for human rights as a single, countrywide phenomenon. This approach masks important variations in the actors perpetrating abuses, motives for the abuse, targets of the abuse, and severity of abuse. The PIs propose that cross-national human rights researchers must break their focus on the country as the unit of analysis and look at the sub-national characteristics of repressive behaviors. The PIs focus on three major factors: 1) antigovernment activity, 2) government decentralization, and 3) local government capacity. They argue that antigovernment dissent encourages government agents to respond with high levels of repression. However, this response is particularly likely when government power is highly decentralized, when the dissent takes place far from the national capital, and when the local government is largely incapable of controlling its repressive agents. The PIs collect the first dataset to document the level of repression at the subnational level for a global sample of countries. These data are likely to be used by government agencies, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, and others to engage in evidence-based policy and advocacy.Technical SummaryWhile levels of state repression and the frequency, severity, and targets of human rights abuses vary spatially within states, most previous studies of these topics have only considered repression in the aggregate. This is problematic because it ignores variation in institutional structures and decision-making processes within countries. The PIs explain this subnational variation of repression within states. In particular, they focus on three major factors: antigovernment activity, government decentralization, and local state capacity. They develop a global dataset that captures violations of physical integrity rights by state agents at the level of the sub-national unit. For this project, the PIs rely on a mix of expert coding, theoretically informed measurement models, and computational techniques, which are capable of coding and then linking together the diverse information drawn from a set of primary source documents. Using this information, they generate standards-based measures for each of several specific types of physical integrity violations (arbitrary detention, torture, disappearances, and extrajudicial execution) as well as a combined indicator for these abuses for each first-order subnational administrative unit within a state. This level of analysis brings scholarship closer to the level at which most citizens encounter the government's legal, political, and bureaucratic authority.