New political issues and opportunities lead new actors into contentious politics. This article studies one such case: transnational migrants making claims and engaging in collective action when traversing state borders. As global migration flows and accompanying political backlash has grown since the mid-2010s, borders have increasingly become sites of contention between groups of migrants seeking entry and state agents attempting to refuse it. Media coverage and elite discourse also has focused on contentious border crossings, with implications for public attitudes toward migration. In this setting, public attitudes toward migrants should vary based on the migrants' tactics and characteristics. We expect migrants engaging in nonviolent resistance to security forces will win more public support than those engaging in violence. Migrant characteristics - claims or motives for migration and ethnic identity - should also affect support. Survey experiments in the United States and Mexico containing fictionalized vignettes of a contentious event at the countries' shared land border show strikingly similar results: migrant nonviolent resistance, compared to violent confrontations, reduces support for deportation and increases beliefs that migrants contribute to society. These effects are consistent across party lines and border proximity. Neither migrants' claims nor migrants' ethnic identity affect public support in the context of a contentious event.

Authoritarian regimes in the 21st century have increasingly turned to using information control rather than kinetic force to respond to threats to their rule. This paper studies an often overlooked type of information control: strategic labeling and public statements by regime sources in response to protests. Labeling protesters as violent criminals may increase support for repression by signaling that protests are illegitimate and deviant. Regime sources, compared to more independent sources, could increase support for repression even more when paired with such an accusatory label. Accommodative labels should have opposing effects-decreasing support for repression. The argument is tested with a survey experiment in China which labels environmental protests. Accusatory labels increase support for repression of protests. Regime sources, meanwhile, have no advantage over non-governmental sources in shifting opinion. The findings suggest that negative labels de-legitimize protesters and legitimize repression while the sources matter less in this contentious authoritarian context.

Scholars contend that the reason for stasis in human rights measures is a biased measurement process, rather than stagnating human rights practices. We argue that bias may be introduced as part of the compilation of the human rights reports that serve as the foundation of human rights measures. An additional source of potential bias may be human coders, who translate human rights reports into human rights scores. We first test for biases via a machine-learning approach using natural language processing and find substantial evidence of bias in human rights scores. We then present findings of an experiment on the coders of human rights reports to assess whether potential changes in the coding procedures or interpretation of coding rules affect scores over time. We find no evidence of coder bias and conclude that human rights measures have changed over time and that bias is introduced as part of monitoring and reporting.

Why do major powers attempt foreign-imposed regime change (FIRC)? This article builds on existing security theory, proposing that a major power looks for signals that a government might exit that major power’s international hierarchy and/or enter an adversary’s hierarchy. Major powers are more likely to attempt FIRC against states that signal shifting preferences. The article tests the theory on American FIRC attempts from 1947 to 1989, covert and overt, failed and successful, proposing that when a hierarchy member or neutral state engaged in economic expropriation, this signaled possible exit from the US hierarchy and/or entry into the Soviet hierarchy, making a US FIRC attempt against that state more likely. It also presents an alternative theory, that economic special interests drove US FIRC attempts. Using new data on expropriations, the article supports the security theory, as expropriations by US hierarchy members made FIRC attempts more likely, but does not support the special interests theory.

Why do some communities flee their homes during armed conflict, while others remain and risk exposure to further violence? This article investigates whether and how whole communities flee home territory, which we refer to as evacuation, in the context of strategic displacement campaigns. We explain variation in the process of forced displacement. Specifically, we differentiate between preemptive (prior to displacement violence) and violent (in response to displacement violence) evacuation. We theorize that social cohesion enhances communities’ ability to preemptively evacuate by facilitating collective action to evade imminent violence exposure. We test the theory in the context of Arab Palestinian communities’ displacement during the 1948 war in Mandate Palestine. We measure village evacuation drawing upon historical accounts of forced displacement during the war and social cohesion using an original dataset based on new archival material from a survey of Arab Palestinian villages conducted during the early 1940s.

Media framing of epidemics was found to influence public perceptions and behaviors in experiments, yet no research has been conducted on real-world behaviors during public health crises. We examined the relationship between Italian news media coverage of COVID-19 and compliance with stay-at-home orders, which could impact the spread of epidemics. We used a computational method for framing analysis (ANTMN) and combined it with Google's Community Mobility data. A time-series analysis using vector autoregressive models showed that the Italian media used media frames that were largely congruent with ones used by journalists in other countries: A scientific frame focusing on symptoms and health effects, a containment frame focusing on attempts to ameliorate risks, and a social frame, focusing on political and social impact. The prominence of different media frames over time was associated with changes in Italians' mobility patterns. Specifically, we found that the social frame was associated with increased mobility, whereas the containment frame was associated with decreased mobility. The results demonstrate that the ways the news media discuss epidemics can influence changes in community mobility, above and beyond the effect of the number of deaths per day.

How do authoritarian regimes prevent protests? One strategy, which frequently accompanies the use of repression, is labeling regime opponents negatively in an attempt to discredit them. This paper considers two frameworks through which negative regime labels about protesters could affect citizens: through persuading them of protesters' illegitimacy, or through signaling the regime's disapproval of protest. We adjudicate the two frameworks with a survey experiment in China which varies regime responses to environmental protest. The results are consistent with the signaling disapproval framework: negative labels do not affect respondents' perceptions of protests but do affect their willingness to protest. Furthermore, these effects depend on respondents' support for the government, and suggest a polarization effect of negative labels. The findings connect research on authoritarian repression and propaganda, suggesting complementarities between the two strategies for regimes.

Human rights measurement efforts have been confronted with concerns of bias practically since quantitative measurement efforts began in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By and large, attacks have focused on biases to the source materials on which these measurement efforts rely-namely, the annual human rights reports produced by Amnesty International and the US Department of State. We take stock and seek to distinguish conceptually distinct types of bias that have been conflated in the past, yet plausibly affect human rights measures. In addition to revisiting reporting bias or organizational bias long identified in the literature, we also disentangle two types of bias that have been of concern more recently: bias attributable to changing standards and information effects. For each type of bias we identify, we provide an empirical implication as to the effect on human rights measures and, importantly, its spatial or temporal variation.

Abstract Human trafficking affects millions of people globally, disproportionately harming women, girls and marginalized groups. Yet one of the main sources of data on global trafficking, the annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Reports, is susceptible to biases because report rankings are tied to political outcomes. The literature on human rights measurements has established two potential sources of bias. The first is the changing standards of accountability, where more information and increased budgets change the standard to which countries are held over time. The second is political biases in reports, which are amended to comply with the interests of the reporting agency. This letter examines whether either of these biases influence the TIP Reports. In contrast to other country-level human rights indicators, the State Department issues both narratives and rankings, which incentivizes attempts to influence the rankings based on political interests. The study uses a supervised machine-learning algorithm to examine how narratives are translated into rankings, to determine whether rankings are biased, and to disentangle whether bias stems from changing standards or political interests. The authors find that the TIP Report rankings are more influenced by political biases than changing standards.

Do coups affect patterns of political violence like violations of physical integrity rights? Do these patterns vary depending on whether coups succeed or fail? We argue that political uncertainty from coups decreases respect for physical integrity rights. Post-coup regimes preemptively repress as a show of strength to deter threats from those excluded from power and settle scores through cycles of retaliation. Additionally, we argue that the retaliation cycle of score settling will last longer after a failed coup because of informational problems that emerge when targeting opponents. Employing data on coups and physical integrity rights from 1980 to 2015, we find coup failure and success to be negatively associated with respect for physical integrity rights, and the cycle of retaliation lasts longer after failed coups.

This research project uses econometric methods and comparative, cross-national data to see whether violations of human rights increase the likelihood of the onset or escalation of violent protest, terrorism and/or civil war. The findings show that these types of violent internal conflict will occur and escalate if governments: (1) torture, politically imprison, kill, or "disappear" people, (2) do not allow women to participate fully in the political system, including allowing them to hold high level national political office, and (3) do not allow women to participate fully in the economic life of the nation by ensuring equal pay for equal work, by encouraging their entry to the highest paid occupations, and by protecting them from sexual harassment at their workplaces. These types of violations of human rights and the existence of large horizontal inequalities in societies independently produce an increased risk of the onset and escalation of many forms of violent internal conflict. The results also provide some evidence for the argument that there is a trade-off between liberty and security.

The success of protests depends on whether they favorably affect public opinion: nonviolent resistance can win public support for a movement, but regimes counter by framing protest as violent and instigated by outsiders. The authors argue that public perceptions of whether a protest is violent shift based on the framing of the types of action and the identities of participants in those actions. The article distinguishes between three dimensions: (1) threat of harm, (2) bearing of arms and (3) identity of protesters. Using survey experiments in Israel and the United States, the study finds support for framing effects. Threat of harm has the largest positive effect on perceptions of violence and support for repression. Surprisingly, social out-groups are not perceived as more violent, but respondents favor repressing them anyway. Support for repressing a nonthreatening out-group is at least as large as support for repressing a threatening in-group. The findings link contentious action and public opinion, and demonstrate the susceptibility of this link to framing.

Does a senator's personal religion influence their legislative behavior in the Senate? To date, empirical research has answered this question only using senators' religious traditions, while more concurrent work implies that religion should be measured as a multifaceted phenomenon. This study tests this proposition by compiling a unique data set of senators' religion, conceptualized and measured by three different elementsbelonging, beliefs, and behavior. The study estimates the association between these three religious facets and senators' legislative behavior on economic, social, and foreign policy issues, while controlling for their constituencies' political and religious preferences. It finds that religious beliefs are a strong predictor of senators' legislative behavior, while religious tradition and behavior are mostly not. Furthermore, it finds that religious beliefs are associated with legislative behavior across a wide array of policy areas and are not confined to sociocultural issues.

Abstract Although every violation of international human rights law standards is both deplorable and illegal, one of the major advances in the social sciences has been the development of measures of comparative state practice. The oldest of these is the Political Terror Scale (PTS), which provides an ordinal measure of physical integrity violations carried out by governments or those associated with the state. Providing data from the mid-1970s to the present, the PTS scores the human rights practices of more than 190 countries on a scale of 1–5, with 1 representing “best practices” and 5 indicating gross and systematic violations. There are two different sources for these scores: U.S. State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices and the Amnesty International Annual Report. Although human rights have traditionally been associated only with the state, individuals can also be denied human rights protection by nonstate actors. To measure this, the Societal Violence Scale has been created to analyze three sources of physical integrity violations: the individual, corporate or criminal gang activity, and armed groups.