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Several studies find the presence of constitutional provisions regulating government declaration of state of emergency to be related to government respect for various human rights (Davenport 1996, Keith and Poe 2004). What we do not know, however, is how often these provisions are used, how they are used, and maybe more importantly, what is the effect of this use on government respect for human rights. In our paper, we examine the relationship between actual implementation of state of emergency status by governments and those governments’ respect for those internationally-recognized human rights for which derogation is allowed. To do so, we use both a new dataset on state of emergency implementation (195 states, 1990-2006) and the CIRI human rights dataset. Most quantitative studies of government respect for human rights work from the premise of soft positivism, holding states accountable to positive law obligations based on universal moral principles. Some classes of human rights are known as jus cogens norms, or nonderogable rights. States have an obligation to respect these rights/norms with no qualifications allowed. This class includes strong norms against slavery, genocide and physical integrity rights violations (torture, summary execution, etc). However, the bulk of internationally-recognized human rights are not members of this class, and international law gives governments a loophole to suspend their protection when a state of emergency has been declared. This legal qualification exists but existing research based on positive law obligations has not yet begun to factor its implementation into models of state-based human rights behavior. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use an original omnibus survey conducted during fall 2006 to both ascertain what are US citizens' attitudes about the use of torture and begin to explore why they have these views.. While there exist widely-agreed-upon findings regarding the determinants of government respect for human rights such as torture, less is understood about either the distribution or formation of citizen attitudes about human rights. This gap in the literature is particularly important because democracy, an important determinant, is understood to be properly functioning when government is accountable - that is, matching policy outputs with citizen preferences. Unlike those other surveys with which we are familiar, our investigation of the formation of citizen attitudes about torture addresses how personal experience affects the development of attitudes towards torture. To the extent our survey results are generalizable to the general public, we find a sizable disconnect between US government policy, practice, and the majority of US citizens' opinions about torture. We also create a new measure, the "Torture Aversiveness Index" (TAI), a 19-pt scale of individuals' level of torture aversiveness. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates the relationship between banking crises and domestic agitation. Key dangers that appear to be prevalent in most banking crises; Relationship between banking crises and domestic political conditions; Dimensions and measurement of domestic agitation.

As part of a current National Science Foundation project (www.humanrightsdata.com), this paper establishes and tests a method for measuring the degree of government effort to protect internationally recognized economic human rights. For many reasons, economic human rights to such things as health care, education, food and housing have been overlooked by most scholars who have taken a scientific approach to the study of human rights. With the end of the cold war, however, human rights organizations such as Amnesty International are giving economic human rights more attention. International debates between the representatives of economically developed and developing countries over trade and development aid also include have included discussions of probable or actual impacts on economic human rights. Moreover, a growing literature demonstrating the linkage of economic globalization, government respect for human rights, and the probability of state failure has placed economic rights in a new light of salience for policymakers. The few quantitatively oriented scholars who have given attention to the subject have analyzed cross-national variations in the level of government protection of economic human rights, using such measures as the Physical Quality of Life Index and the Human Development Index. The problem with such measures is that they are highly correlated with national wealth, and they reflect human rights conditions experienced by the people living in a country, not the human rights policies of governments. In this work, we seek to develop measures of government policies to promote or violate the economic human rights of their citizens that are analogous to widely used measures of government policies to protect or violate human rights to personal integrity such as the Political Terror Scale, the Freedom House Civil Rights Index, and the Cingranelli/Richards Index of Personal Integrity. These measures of government policies to respect economic human rights are being developed as part of a project currently funded by the National Science Foundation that will produce a human rights dataset for public distribution in 2004. The dataset will contain multiple measures of government respect for various types of internationally recognized human rights for over 160 countries from 1981 to 2002. Information from this dataset about government protection of personal integrity and civil rights already has been used by the World Bank in its Governance Matters report. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The legal and ethical limits of interrogation techniques engaged in by agents of the US government may be the most hotly debated political item in the last half-decade. Drawing from research grounded in ambivalence, we present the results of an original survey that asks respondents about the acceptability of a variety of specific interrogation techniques as well as asks typical general questions about torture. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A zip file containing the revised paper will be available immediately prior to the Midwestern Conference in April. Any questions can be directed to David Richards at drichards@ets.org Data from the Western Conference version, and information about the CIRI Human Rights Data Project can be found at: http://mysite.verizon.net/~daver68/ciri.htm [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]