The rights of the child, as recognised by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child have been increasingly reiterated in international declarations and national commitments. However, there exists a disparity in `the de jure... more
The rights of the child, as recognised by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child have been increasingly reiterated in international declarations and national commitments. However, there exists a disparity in `the de jure protection and de facto realization of human rights' (Landman 2005: 5). The relative absence of systematic engagement within academia and without on the issue of mapping the operationalisation of children's rights by States not only hinders ongoing attempts to identify and explain the causes and variation in the failure to implement children's rights but also weakens national and international efforts to hold States accountable for their obligations. This article seeks to address the lack of utilisation of measures of children's rights and the deficiencies in the measures that are in use. By drawing on the existing academic literature and intergovernmental efforts to measure human rights, the article proposes a measurement matrix that could be used to chart the implementation of States' obligations towards children's rights. The matrix is an attempt to further the emerging international endeavours to develop children's rights indicators.
The measurement of human rights has long been debated within the various academic disciplines that focus on human rights, as well as within the larger international community of practitioners working in the field of human rights. Written... more
The measurement of human rights has long been debated within the various academic disciplines that focus on human rights, as well as within the larger international community of practitioners working in the field of human rights.
Written by leading experts in the field, this is the most up-to-date and comprehensive book on how to measure human rights.
Measuring Human Rights:
o draws explicitly on the international law of human rights to derive the content of human rights that ought to be measured
o contains a comprehensive methodological framework for operationalizing this human rights content into human rights measures
o includes separate chapters on the methods, strengths and biases of different human rights measures, including events-based, standards-based, survey-based, and socio-economic and administrative statistics
o covers measures of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights
o includes a complete bibliography, as well as sources and locations for data sets useful for the measurement of human rights.
This volume offers a significant and timely addition to this important area of work in the field of human rights, and will be of interest to academics and NGOs, INGOs, international governmental organizations, international financial institutions, and national governments themselves.
This research replicates and expands upon the work of Winters and Campbell by using data from focus groups conducted in Essex, England on the evenings of the first-ever leaders’ debates of the 2010 general election. Replicating a modified... more
This research replicates and expands upon the work of Winters and Campbell by using data from focus groups conducted in Essex, England on the evenings of the first-ever leaders’ debates of the 2010 general election. Replicating a modified version of the Winters and Campbell research design, this paper triangulates British Election Study data with participant evaluations of the three main party leaders using grounded theory method and discourse analysis techniques on the textual data from the Qualitative Election Study of Britain. This study also introduces an innovation in the presentation of findings from grounded theory method by identifying the most salient concepts in each leader’s evaluations. Our results produce qualitatively informed evaluation structures for each party leader that contextualize the quantitative survey findings.
We use focus group transcripts from the innovative Qualitative Election Study of Britain data set to provide insights into why ‘Cleggmania’ failed to translate into electoral success for the Liberal Democrats in 2010. Analyses conducted... more
We use focus group transcripts from the innovative Qualitative Election Study of Britain data set to provide insights into why ‘Cleggmania’ failed to translate into electoral success for the Liberal Democrats in 2010. Analyses conducted on participants' vote choice stories indicate the effect of ‘Cleggmania’ was limited to strengthening the resolve of wavering Liberal Democrats. Long-time Labour and Conservative supporters who leaned Liberal Democrat before the election found their latent party identification made voting for a different party psychologically uncomfortable. Qualitative electoral research can advance our understanding of people's voting calculus by analysing narratives for values, identity, utility maximising and constituency dynamics.
This research replicates and expands upon the qualitative electoral research of Winters and Campbell by using data from focus groups conducted in Essex, England to coincide with three leadership debates during the 2010 British general... more
This research replicates and expands upon the qualitative electoral research of Winters and Campbell by using data from focus groups conducted in Essex, England to coincide with three leadership debates during the 2010 British general election. The Qualitative Election Study of Britain (QES Britain) broadly replicated Winters and Campbell’s research design but includes innovations in data collection to more accurately capture assessments. This innovation means the data coding are based entirely on the evaluations of the participants. In our analysis we innovate in the way we display each leaders’ unique evaluation structure. To capture the salience and direction of leadership assessments, we convey the dimensionality of popular perceptions for Brown, Cameron and Clegg using colour and scaling. Our results produce qualitatively informed evaluation structures for each party leader that contextualize quantitative survey findings. Although this case study is limited to a geographically specific group of participants, our results mirror the quantitative BES results. Such similarity in the qualitative and quantitative results increases our confidence that our results provide useful insights into the associations and evaluations ordinary people used in their assessments of the main political party leaders.
Focus group transcripts from the qualitative panel dataset the Qualitative Election Study of Britain provide new insights into why the phenomenon ‘Cleggmania’ failed to translate into electoral success for the Liberal Democrats. Narrative... more
Focus group transcripts from the qualitative panel dataset the Qualitative Election Study of Britain provide new insights into why the phenomenon ‘Cleggmania’ failed to translate into electoral success for the Liberal Democrats. Narrative and discourse analyses conducted on participants’ vote choice stories indicate the effect of ‘Cleggmania’ was limited to strengthening the resolve of wavering Liberal Democrats. Long-time Labour and Conservative supporters who were leaning Liberal Democrat found their latent identification made voting for a different party uncomfortable. Electoral research can be further advanced through qualitative analysis by delving deeper into the narratives that individuals construct about their vote choice.
Empirical research has reached no conclusion on human rights performance as a determinant of bilateral foreign aid. This article proposes that these results stem from two hitherto unrecognised factors: a contrary strategy that donor... more
Empirical research has reached no conclusion on human rights performance as a determinant of bilateral foreign aid. This article proposes that these results stem from two hitherto unrecognised factors: a contrary strategy that donor governments follow with regard to human rights and the extent to which they care about human rights protection in the recipient countries. The existing literature on foreign aid and human rights expects donor governments to punish recipient governments for low levels of physical integrity rights protection and reward them for improvements in human rights. However, we argue that donors identify low levels of recipient human rights protection as a need for greater monetary assistance to improve their performance. Whether donor governments decide to alleviate this need depends on how much their voters and therewith the governments themselves care about the protection of human rights. We test our hypotheses by comparing the conditional effect of protection of physical integrity rights in donor and recipient countries across different aid types using recently available aid data on OECD and non-OECD donors. The analysis of bilateral aid flows between 38 donors and 95 recipients from 1981-2007 supports our theory.
The research question at the core of this study examined how people in Britain perceived the leaders of the three main political parties. To answer this question, we collected data from fourteen focus groups held during and after the 2010... more
The research question at the core of this study examined how people in Britain perceived the leaders of the three main political parties. To answer this question, we collected data from fourteen focus groups held during and after the 2010 election campaign in the three nations of Britain. The Qualitative Election Study of Britain was the qualitative dataset generated from the transcripts of these focus groups. We used the grounded theory method to evaluate these data and examine how people viewed the leaders of the three main political parties. This method required reading and categorizing the data multiple times to uncover different layers of patterns and codes. Each process of categorization yielded categories and connections that were more substantive and analytical than the previous iteration. The grounded theory method was the appropriate method to examine popular perceptions of party leaders during the 2010 election campaign as it let us systematically uncover patterns and codes through a process of successive coding; we could analyse the data without preconceptions about what we would find. However, the method was not sufficient to provide deeper and nuanced representations of why people held such views. Therefore, we used discourse analysis to complement the grounded theory method and get the most detail from the data.
