Scholars and practitioners, from Alexis de Tocqueville to the United Nations, have long argued about the connection between democracy and human rights.
Democratizing states promise improved human rights practices, and liberal democracies embody many core human rights principles. Further, democratic institutions are often necessary to safeguard human rights and implement international human rights laws. This is not to suggest that democracies fully protect human rights or that all democracies provide the same levels of human rights protections. This also does not imply that non-democracies cannot protect human rights. Instead, the purported connection between democracy and human rights suggests that stronger democracies bring better human rights protections.
Missing from these arguments, however, is how citizens themselves understand the connection between human rights and democracy.
