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不同程度的尊重人权？此外，为什么是公民？人权在一些国家的边界内普遍受到统一保护（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，在另一些地方受到严格限制？以前的研究调查的模式，人权保护和侵犯，通常处理国家作为中央决策者和审查国家尊重人权作为一个单一的，全国性的现象。这种做法掩盖了实施虐待的行为者、虐待动机、虐待目标和虐待严重程度等方面的重要差异。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。 PI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人员以高度的镇压作为回应。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，当地方政府基本上无法控制其镇压代理人时，这种反应特别可能。PI收集了第一个数据集，以记录全球抽样国家在国家以下一级的镇压程度。这些数据很可能被政府机构，国际组织，非政府组织和其他人用来从事基于证据的政策和advocations.Technical摘要虽然国家镇压的水平和频率，严重程度和侵犯人权的目标在国家内部空间上各不相同，这些主题的大多数以前的研究只考虑了总的镇压。这是有问题的，因为它忽视了各国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变化。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国家能力。 他们开发了一个全球数据集，捕捉国家代理人在国家以下单位一级侵犯身体完整权的情况。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安全行为（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衡量标准，并为一个国家内的每个一级国家以下行政单位制定了这些侵权行为的综合指标。这一层次的分析使学术研究更接近于大多数公民遇到政府的法律的、政治的和官僚的权威的层次。

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.