A Tale of Two Trends: Democracy and Human Rights, 1981–2010

Abstract

Democratic principles and human rights norms have diffused widely during the global era, which suggests that democracy levels and human rights practices should be improving over time and converging across countries. I test these propositions using two measures of democracy (Freedom House and Polity IV) and two measures of human rights (Political Terror Scale and Cingranelli-Richards Index) that cover the 1981–2010 period. I find that democracy ratings have both increased and converged considerably, while human rights ratings have worsened and diverged slightly. In fact, human rights practices have worsened by as much as 5% to 10% over the past three decades. An apples-to-apples comparison of 99 countries with annual ratings across all four indicators during the 1981–2010 period reveals that (1) the world is now more democratic than it is respectful of human rights, and (2) there is now more cross-national variation in human rights practices than in levels of political freedom. These findings confirm that, although “third wave” democratization has pulled most of the developing world politically closer to the West, nothing comparable has occurred in the human rights sector.