The Cingranelli and Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Data Set

The CIRI Human Rights Dataset contains standards-based quantitative information on government respect for 13 internationally recognized human rights for 162 countries, annually from 1981-2003. It is designed for use by scholars and students who seek to test theories about the causes and consequences of human rights violations, as well as policy makers and analysts who seek to estimate the human rights effects of a wide variety of institutional changes and public policies including democratization, economic aid, military aid, structural adjustment, and humanitarian intervention.

CIRI:

1. Contains measures of government human rights practices, not human rights policies or human rights conditions
2. Contains measures of specific human rights practices like torture, which can either be analyzed separately or combined into valid and reliable indices.
3. Describes a wide variety of government human rights practices including worker rights, women's rights, and freedom of religion over a 22-year period.
4. Is replicable. The detailed coding manual included on the web site allows anyone to reapply our detailed coding rules to cases included in the dataset.
5. Is reliable. At least two trained coders evaluated each variable for each country year.
6. Will be updated and expanded in August 2005 and, pending adequate support, annually thereafter.
7. Allows users to save their data query settings in MyCIRI for easy updating of their data when CIRI is updated.

Included in the data set are measures of government respect for:

• Physical integrity rights--the rights not to be tortured, summarily executed, disappeared, or imprisoned for political beliefs. The scores of these variables can be summed to form a statistically valid cumulative scale (Cingranelli and Richards, 1999; Richards, Gelleny, and Sacko, 2001).
• Civil liberties such as free speech, freedom of association and assembly, freedom of movement, freedom of religion, and the right to participate in the selection of government leaders.
• Worker rights
• The Rights of women to equal treatment politically, economically, and socially.

The next version of CIRI will:

• Include reliability scores for each variable.
• Include new measures of government respect for: economic human rights and the human rights of foreign nationals.
• Make it possible to create customized world or regional maps of human rights practices for classroom or other uses.

This research project was supported by grant 0318273 from the Political Science Division of the National Science Foundation and occasional smaller grants from the World Bank. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of National Science Foundation or the World Bank.  Besides Cingranelli and Richards, major contributors to the data collection effort include Rodwan Abouharb, Shawna Sweeney, and Craig Webster.