In the 1960s, Nordic countries initiated awareness campaigns to mobilize support for their aid programs, which effectively galvanized public enthusiasm for the delivery of aid. Consequently, Nordic aid had a strong development orientation and sustained broader humanitarian goals, including enhancing human rights in developing countries. The same logic can be applied to the connection between public support of human rights and the chances that a national government will set human rights as a public policy agenda. Without insistence from the public, elected leaders will rarely give priority to respecting and protecting human rights in the country and around the world.
Central to the methods of measuring this public opinion is the social survey. But such a “human rights survey” has not yet emerged as a substantiated and/or legitimated tool to capture public understanding of attitudes towards and experiences of human rights and their violations. For the most part, only sketchy opinion polls with selected items of human rights have appeared, and these provided a limited understanding of what citizens think about human rights. Consider, for example, the Foreign Policy Leadership Project, conducted by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, which began to assess the significance of human rights as a foreign policy frame in 1978. In particular, it asked the public to rate the importance of various American policy goals—including the goal of defending human rights in other countries—and found that the human rights goal consistently ranked lower than goals serving national interests.
The available opinion polls fall far short of conceptualizing and measuring human rights in a broader spectrum. Even now, the available opinion polls fall far short of conceptualizing and measuring human rights in a broader spectrum, nor do they sufficiently or systematically identify individual traits responsible for higher or lower human rights orientations. Globally, there is an increasing consensus that human rights are multidimensional and that remarkable differences exist among global citizens in their human rights orientation. The existing data limitations have now pushed thoughtful people to design questionnaires explicitly and exclusively focused on human rights and their potential determinants.
