Collaborative Research: Sub-national Analysis of Repression Project

为什么我们在同一个国家的不同地区观察到对人权的尊重程度不同？此外，为什么是公民？人权在一些国家境内普遍受到保护（或滥用），而在另一些国家，这些权利在一些地方普遍得到维护，而在另一些地方则受到严重限制。先前调查人权保护和侵犯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视为一种单一的、全国性的现象。这种做法掩盖了在实施虐待行为者、虐待动机、虐待目标和虐待严重程度方面的重要差异。pi建议，跨国人权研究人员必须打破他们对国家作为分析单位的关注，并关注镇压行为的次国家特征。ppi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，反政府异议会鼓励政府特工以高水平的镇压作为回应。然而，当政府权力高度分散，当异议发生在远离国家首都的地方，当地方政府在很大程度上无法控制其镇压代理人时，这种反应尤其可能发生。ppi收集了第一个数据集，记录了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、非政府组织和其他机构用于从事基于证据的政策和宣传。虽然国家镇压的程度以及侵犯人权的频率、严重程度和目标因国家而异，但大多数关于这些主题的先前研究只考虑了总体上的镇压。这是有问题的，因为它忽略了国家内部体制结构和决策过程的差异。PIs解释了各州内部压制的次国家差异。他们特别关注三个主要因素：反政府活动、政府权力下放和地方国家能力。他们开发了一个全球数据集，记录了国家工作人员在地方单位层面侵犯人身完整权的行为。对于这个项目，pi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，这些技术能够编码，然后将从一组主要源文件中提取的各种信息链接在一起。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）中的每一种行为制定了基于标准的措施，并为一个国家内每个一级地方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.