Undergraduate Research Assistance: Data on Human Rights Violations.

Florida State University, Tallahassee FL

Investigators

Abstract

This research addresses four overarching questions of clear importance in world politics today. When state torture occurs, what agency of the government tortures? What is the state response to allegations of torture? Who is tortured? What types of torture are used? The project tackles all four questions, but is focused particularly on the first two. The research seeks to map the impact of political institutions on the practice of torture and especially upon the elimination of torture as a practice. Building such a map requires that the researchers identify the specific government agencies involved and begin to explore the impact of both political institutions and specific policies upon the elimination of torture. The project uses Amnesty International (AI) reports to collect data on the extent to which the military, police officers, prison officials, and other government agencies ill-treat or torture those in their custody. The project grew out of the investigator?s prior research finding that democracies were more likely than autocratic governments to eliminate the practice of torture only when there were no groups using violence to challenge the government. The study also found that institutional separation of powers made governments less likely to eliminate the practice of torture. Although this work identified important linkages between political institutions and the practice of torture, it was limited due to the crude data available about the extent to which governments fail to meet their obligation not to torture. In the investigator's prior NSF-funded work, more than 20 undergraduates and several graduate students read AI's publications for the years 1995-2005 and coded data on a wide variety of variables about the extent to which governments engaged in torture, investigated allegations of torture, and punished those found guilty of torturing prisoners. The result is a large database about the torture and ill-treatment practices of governments. This new project converts the raw data as collected into user-friendly data that can be accessed on the Internet. The raw data is being assembled into two formats, one of which is widely used throughout the scholarly literature on conflict, cooperation, and human rights, and the other of which is gaining increasing acceptance as a valuable alternative to the standard bearer. Undergraduate research assistants will be hired to perform the majority of these tasks. Florida State has an undergraduate research program that identifies, recruits, and trains students to participate in faculty research as preparation for pursuing honors theses and provides them with background to apply effectively to graduate programs or pursue other opportunities in which research plays a role. This project will thus contribute to the development of the nation's scientific infrastructure by providing the next generation of researchers with experience as undergraduates. The publicly available, user-friendly database will serve as a source of information for a variety of other analyses of interest to researchers and human rights advocates alike.