Do cross-national measures of human rights provide meaningful information that could be used to promote better enjoyment of human rights globally and without discrimination? In their recent post, Neve Gordon and Nitza Berkovitch argue that they do not, using as an example the CIRI Human Rights Data Project’s Electoral Self-Determination measure and its failure to account for the United States’ criminal disenfranchisement policies. I am sympathetic to many of Gordon and Berkovitch’s concerns. Like them, I personally believe that the degree of criminal disenfranchisement in the United States constitutes an unacceptable limitation on the right to vote, especially among African-Americans. However, as a human rights scholar and co-director of the now-archived CIRI Project, I believe that quantitative scholars have produced many important findings and are constantly improving our knowledge. The usefulness of those advances, of course, depends on understanding how the data are created and using the right data for the question being asked.
The difficulties surrounding the definition and measurement of the enjoyment of human rights are common to all studies in the field, regardless of approach. When the CIRI Human Rights Data Project began, its founders, David L. Cingranelli and David L. Richards, chose to focus on government respect for human rights—i.e., the degree to which government practices mirror the state’s obligation to respect human rights in international law. As stated in the CIRI coding guidelines (pg. 61), the electoral self-determination measure was grounded primarily in Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which states that citizens have the right to electoral self-determination “without unreasonable restrictions.”
