TY - JOUR
T1 - Torture allegations as events data
T2 - Introducing the Ill-Treatment and Torture (ITT) specific allegation data
AU - Conrad, Courtenay R.
AU - Haglund, Jillienne
AU - Moore, Will H.
N1 - Funding Information:
The ITT Data Collection Project has received support from the US National Science Foundation (Grants #0921397 and #1123666), the Department of Political Science at Florida State University, the School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts at the University of California, Merced, and the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
PY - 2014/5
Y1 - 2014/5
N2 - The Ill-Treatment and Torture (ITT) Data Collection Project uses content analysis to measure a number of variables on more than 15,000 public allegations of government ill-treatment and torture made by Amnesty International (AI) from 1995 to 2005. The ITT specific allegation (SA) event data use the torture allegation as the unit of observation, thus permitting users to manipulate them for a wide variety of purposes. In this article, we introduce the ITT SA data. We first describe the key variables in the SA data and report a number of bivariate descriptive statistics to illustrate some of the research questions that might be usefully investigated with the data. We then discuss how we believe the ITT SA data can be used to study not only AI's naming and shaming behavior, but also states' (lack of) compliance with the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT). We conclude with an empirical analysis using the SA data that investigates the effect of domestic political institutions on formal complaints, investigations, and adjudication of torture allegations. We show that legislative checks are positively associated with complaints, investigations, and trials; elections and freedom of speech are positively associated with investigations and trials; and powerful judiciaries are associated only with investigations.
AB - The Ill-Treatment and Torture (ITT) Data Collection Project uses content analysis to measure a number of variables on more than 15,000 public allegations of government ill-treatment and torture made by Amnesty International (AI) from 1995 to 2005. The ITT specific allegation (SA) event data use the torture allegation as the unit of observation, thus permitting users to manipulate them for a wide variety of purposes. In this article, we introduce the ITT SA data. We first describe the key variables in the SA data and report a number of bivariate descriptive statistics to illustrate some of the research questions that might be usefully investigated with the data. We then discuss how we believe the ITT SA data can be used to study not only AI's naming and shaming behavior, but also states' (lack of) compliance with the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT). We conclude with an empirical analysis using the SA data that investigates the effect of domestic political institutions on formal complaints, investigations, and adjudication of torture allegations. We show that legislative checks are positively associated with complaints, investigations, and trials; elections and freedom of speech are positively associated with investigations and trials; and powerful judiciaries are associated only with investigations.
KW - data collection
KW - human rights
KW - torture
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U2 - 10.1177/0022343314524427
DO - 10.1177/0022343314524427
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84899964924
SN - 0022-3433
VL - 51
SP - 429
EP - 438
JO - Journal of Peace Research
JF - Journal of Peace Research
IS - 3
ER -