Date of Award

4-2012

Document Type

Thesis

Department

Political Science

First Advisor

Patrick Donnay

Abstract

It has been a long-standing topic of discussion within the field of political science on the extent to which the establishment of democratic regime characteristics influences the development of human rights. While there is considerable research in the areas of democracy and human rights, what the literature lacks is research towards the growth of democratic regime characteristics being causal to the development of human rights practices. This analysis shows that a transition in democratic regime characteristics is directly linked to the development of human rights. After completing case-study analysis and developing causal theory I take data from the years 1981 and 2009 from both the Cingranelli and Richards Human Rights Data Project and the Polity IV Project: Political Regime Characteristics and combine them into one dataset. In the final analysis there is evidence of a strong causal link between the growth of certain democratic characteristics and the development of human rights.

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