IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/jocore/v66y2022i2p357-384.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Measuring Human Rights Abuse from Access to Information Requests

Author

Listed:
  • Sarah A. V. Ellington
  • Benjamin E. Bagozzi
  • Daniel Berliner
  • Brian Palmer-Rubin
  • Aaron Erlich

Abstract

Existing measures of human rights abuses are often only available at the country-year level. Several more fine-grained measures exhibit spatio-temporal inaccuracies or reporting biases due to the primary sources upon which they rely. To address these challenges, and to increase the diversity of available human rights measures more generally, this study provides the first quantitative effort to measure human rights abuses from textual records of citizen-government interactions. Using a dataset encompassing over 1.5 million access-to-information (ATI) requests made to the Mexican federal government from June 2003 onward, supervised classification is used to identify the subset of these requests that pertain to human rights abuses of various types. The results from this supervised machine learning exercise are validated against (i) gold standard ATI requests pertaining to past human rights abuses in Mexico and (ii) several accepted external measures of sub-national and sub-annual human rights abuses. In doing so, we demonstrate that the measurement of human rights abuses from citizen-submitted ATI request texts can provide measures of human rights abuse that exhibit both high validity and notable spatio-temporal specificity, relative to existent human rights datasets and variables.

Suggested Citation

  • Sarah A. V. Ellington & Benjamin E. Bagozzi & Daniel Berliner & Brian Palmer-Rubin & Aaron Erlich, 2022. "Measuring Human Rights Abuse from Access to Information Requests," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 66(2), pages 357-384, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:jocore:v:66:y:2022:i:2:p:357-384
    DOI: 10.1177/00220027211035553
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00220027211035553
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/00220027211035553?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Tiago Peixoto & Micah L. Sifry, 2017. "Civic Tech in the Global South," World Bank Publications - Books, The World Bank Group, number 27947.
    2. von Borzyskowski, Inken & Wahman, Michael, 2021. "Systematic Measurement Error in Election Violence Data: Causes and Consequences," British Journal of Political Science, Cambridge University Press, vol. 51(1), pages 230-252, January.
    3. Greene, Kevin T. & Park, Baekkwan & Colaresi, Michael, 2019. "Machine Learning Human Rights and Wrongs: How the Successes and Failures of Supervised Learning Algorithms Can Inform the Debate About Information Effects," Political Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 27(2), pages 223-230, April.
    4. André Bächtiger & Dominik Hangartner, 2010. "When Deliberative Theory Meets Empirical Political Science: Theoretical and Methodological Challenges in Political Deliberation," Political Studies, Political Studies Association, vol. 58, pages 609-629, October.
    5. Fariss, Christopher J., 2014. "Respect for Human Rights has Improved Over Time: Modeling the Changing Standard of Accountability," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 108(2), pages 297-318, May.
    6. André Bächtiger & Dominik Hangartner, 2010. "When Deliberative Theory Meets Empirical Political Science: Theoretical and Methodological Challenges in Political Deliberation," Political Studies, Political Studies Association, vol. 58(4), pages 609-629, October.
    7. Nils B. Weidmann, 2016. "A Closer Look at Reporting Bias in Conflict Event Data," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 60(1), pages 206-218, January.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Pearce Edwards & Patrick Pierson, 2023. "Incumbent-Aligned Terrorism and Voting Behavior: Evidence from Argentina’s 1973 Elections," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 67(4), pages 672-700, April.
    2. Jule Krüger & Ragnhild Nordås, 2020. "A latent variable approach to measuring wartime sexual violence," Journal of Peace Research, Peace Research Institute Oslo, vol. 57(6), pages 728-739, November.
    3. Reeder, Bryce W. & Arce, Moises & Siefkas, Adrian, 2022. "Environmental justice organizations and the diffusion of conflicts over mining in Latin America," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 154(C).
    4. Sanders James & Lisi Giulio & Schonhardt-Bailey Cheryl, 2017. "Themes and Topics in Parliamentary Oversight Hearings: A New Direction in Textual Data Analysis," Statistics, Politics and Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 8(2), pages 153-194, December.
    5. Sanders, James & Lisi, Giulio & Schonhardt-Bailey, Cheryl, 2018. "Themes and topics in parliamentary oversight hearings: a new direction in textual data analysis," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 87624, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    6. Manuel Fischer & Philip Leifeld, 2015. "Policy forums: Why do they exist and what are they used for?," Policy Sciences, Springer;Society of Policy Sciences, vol. 48(3), pages 363-382, September.
    7. Svend-Erik Skaaning, 2018. "Different Types of Data and the Validity of Democracy Measures," Politics and Governance, Cogitatio Press, vol. 6(1), pages 105-116.
    8. Federico Ast, 2019. "The Deliberative Test, a New Procedural Method for Ethical Decision Making in Integrative Social Contracts Theory," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 155(1), pages 207-221, March.
    9. Schonhardt-Bailey, Cheryl & Dann, Christopher & Chapman, Jacob, 2022. "The accountability gap: deliberation on monetary policy in Britain and America during the financial crisis," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 114364, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    10. Cullen S. Hendrix & Idean Salehyan, 2017. "A House Divided," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 61(8), pages 1653-1681, September.
    11. Schonhardt-Bailey, Cheryl & Dann, Christopher & Chapman, Jacob, 2022. "The accountability gap: Deliberation on monetary policy in Britain and America during the financial crisis," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 74(C).
    12. Leopoldo Fergusson & Carlos Molina, 2020. "Facebook Causes Protests," HiCN Working Papers 323, Households in Conflict Network.
    13. Mueller, Hannes & Rauh, Christopher, 2018. "Reading Between the Lines: Prediction of Political Violence Using Newspaper Text," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 112(2), pages 358-375, May.
    14. Dreher, Axel & Fuchs, Andreas & Langlotz, Sarah, 2019. "The effects of foreign aid on refugee flows," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 112(C), pages 127-147.
    15. Tähtinen, Tuuli, 2024. "When Facebook Is the Internet: The Role of Social Media in Ethnic Conflict," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 180(C).
    16. Kikuta,Kyosuke & Hanayama,Manaho, 2023. "Does the Nobel Peace Prize Improve Women’s Rights? Prize and Praise in International Relations," IDE Discussion Papers 903, Institute of Developing Economies, Japan External Trade Organization(JETRO).
    17. Escriba-Folch, Abel & Meseguer, Covadonga & Wright, Joseph, 2018. "Remittances and protest in dictatorships," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 89058, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    18. Kikuta,Kyosuke, 2024. "Eclipse: How Darkness Shapes Violence in Africa," IDE Discussion Papers 941, Institute of Developing Economies, Japan External Trade Organization(JETRO).
    19. von Borzyskowski, Inken & Wahman, Michael, 2018. "Systematic measurement error in election violence data: causes and consequences," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 90450, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    20. Kimberly R Frugé, 2019. "Repressive agent defections: How power, costs, and uncertainty influence military behavior and state repression," Conflict Management and Peace Science, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 36(6), pages 591-607, November.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:jocore:v:66:y:2022:i:2:p:357-384. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://pss.la.psu.edu/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.