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Popular Versus Elite Democracies And Human Rights: Inclusion Makes A Difference, Devin K. Joshi, J. S. Maloy, Timothy M. Peterson
Popular Versus Elite Democracies And Human Rights: Inclusion Makes A Difference, Devin K. Joshi, J. S. Maloy, Timothy M. Peterson
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Scholarly research generally finds that democratic governments are more likely to respect human rights than other types of regimes. Different human rights practices among long-standing and affluent democracies therefore present a puzzle. Drawing from democratic theory and comparative institutional studies, we argue more inclusive or "popular" democracies should enforce human rights better than more exclusive or "elite" democracies, even in the face of security threats from armed conflict. Instead of relying on the Freedom House or Polity indexes to distinguish levels of democracy, we adopt a more focused approach to measuring structures of inclusion, the Institutional Democracy Index (IDI), which …
International Human Rights Law And Social Movements: States' Resistance And Civil Society's Insistence, Kiyoteru Tsutsui, Claire Whitlinger, Alwyn Lim
International Human Rights Law And Social Movements: States' Resistance And Civil Society's Insistence, Kiyoteru Tsutsui, Claire Whitlinger, Alwyn Lim
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This review examines recent scholarship on the rise of international human rights law and proposes that social movements have played critical roles both in elevating the standards of human rights in international law and in leveraging these standards into better local practices. Institutionalization of universal human rights principles began in the immediate post–World War II period, in which civil society actors worked with powerful states to establish human rights as a key guiding principle of the international community and to ensure the actors' continuing participation in international human rights institutions. The subsequent decades saw various hurdles arise in international politics, …