The Analysis of Human Rights Data over Time

The last two decades have seen an upsurge in the documentation of human rights abuses. Amnesty International, Freedom House, the United States Government's State Department, the Yale Political Data Program, and many other organizations and private citizens have collected data on the status of freedom around the world. Now it is coming time to analyze these data. Governments have begun to incorporate such information into their policy making; funding is being tied to the human rights record. Most important, the United States State Department and other groups are evaluating the efficacy of previous efforts at improvement, such as those of the Carter administration. These applications demand a very thoughtful level of analysis. Certain aspects of the data are easy to interpret. It requires little sophistication to identify gross abuses, or to detect stunning improvements. Nonetheless, there are other questions worth asking, and more information hidden in the data than has yet been uncovered. For example, one wants to determine whether specific policies have been influential in fostering amelioration. Similarly, one wants to distinguish between persistent trends