Comparative human rights: an integrative explanation

ABSTRACT

The comparative study of human rights is a relatively recent academic undertaking. Its development has been characterized by conceptual arguments regarding the “true” meaning of human rights, and the lack of agreement on their “proper” measurement. Beyond these basic controversies lies a somewhat confusing array of theoretical explanations regarding the causes of differing levels of human rights conditions. This article suggests a measure of human rights which reflects a universally‐recognized definition and permits the cross‐national exploration of three common explanations of human rights conditions. These explanations, ... legal, structural, and economic, ... are then integrated into a general model which is tested using path analysis. The findings suggest that integrating these explanations provides an improvement over any of the individual explanations, and accounts for a relatively impressive amount of the variance found in national human rights conditions.