Neve Gordon and Nitza Berkovitch recently argued that cross-national quantitative analysis of human rights is based on biased data. They claim that this data ignores significant sub-national variation, hides significant human rights problems in otherwise “highly scored” countries such as the United States, and suffers from methodological nationalism, or the fallacy of treating entire nation states as comparable “units of analysis”.
Ironically, these assertions are based on (1) over generalization from a very small sample of published work, (2) severe selection bias of the large and increasingly sophisticated work in this genre that tackles precisely the issues that they allege are problematic, and (3) ignorance of the work published by these same scholars that does not employ this particular method of analysis.
They assert that, “in sociology and political science most human rights scholars use cross-national datasets for their research”. It is not clear on what basis this assertion is made, since they present no statistical analysis of leading peer review journal or research monograph content. They claim that many of the scales used to measure human rights give scores that are too high for countries such as the United States, which ignore the disproportionate treatment of African Americans by the police and the historical patterns of disenfranchisement of black and ethnic minorities.
