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Abstract
The CIRI Human Rights Data Project provides information about government respect for a broad array of human rights in nearly every country in the world. Covering twenty-six years, fifteen separate human rights practices, and 195 countries, it is one of the largest human rights data sets in the world. This essay provides an overview of the CIRI project and our response to some critiques of the CIRI physical integrity rights index. Compared to the Political Terror Scale (PTS), the CIRI physical integrity rights index is focused on government human rights practices, can be disaggregated, is more transparent in its construction, and is more replicable because of the transparency of our coding rules. Furthermore, unlike the PTS, the unidimensionality of the CIRI index has been demonstrated empirically. For these reasons, the CIRI index is a more valid index of physical integrity rights.
I. Introduction
The Cingranelli and Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Data Project provides standards-based measures of government human rights practices, using much of the broad range of human rights recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The broad scope of human rights represented by our measures is an important feature, as one of the main purposes of the CIRI project was to expand theory building and empirical research about government human rights practices beyond the extant dominant concern with violations of physical integrity rights.
The current focus within political science on physical integrity rights is ironic because one of the earliest attempts to measure the human rights practices of all countries of the world was quite comprehensive. Between 1983 and 1992, Charles Humana published three editions of his World Human Rights Guide.2 Humana's guides were systematic attempts to track changes in government respect for a wide variety of human rights in a variety of countries over time. The countries and rights included in Humana's guides varied from edition to edition, but it was always broadly comparative. Humana divided his list of human rights into positive rights (freedom to), negative rights (freedom from), legal rights, and personal rights. He scored individually each particular right for each country and assigned a "grade" for each right in each country ranging from full respect to none. Humana suffered many criticisms of his pioneering project; he was...