Suchergebnisse

There is an ongoing debate about whether human rights standards have changed over the last 30 years. The evidence for or against this shift relies upon indicators created by human coders reading the texts of human rights reports. To help resolve this debate, we suggest translating the question of changing standards into a supervised learning problem. From this perspective, the application of consistent standards over time implies a time-constant mapping from the textual features in reports to the human coded scores. Alternatively, if the meaning of abuses have evolved over time, then the same textual features will be labeled with different numerical scores at distinct times. Of course, while the mapping from natural language to numerical human rights score is a highly complicated function, we show that these two distinct data generation processes imply divergent overall patterns of accuracy when we train a wide variety of algorithms on older versus newer sets of observations to learn how to automatically label texts with scores. Our results are consistent with the expectation that standards of human rights have changed over time.

Do public opinion dynamics play an important role in understanding conflict trajectories between democratic governments and other rival groups? The authors interpret several theories of opinion dynamics as competing clusters of contemporaneous causal links connoting reciprocity, accountability, and credibility. They translate these clusters into four distinct Bayesian structural time series models fit to events data from the Israeli—Palestinian conflict with variables for U.S. intervention and Jewish public opinion about prospects for peace. A credibility model, allowing Jewish public opinion to influence U.S., Palestinian, and Israeli behavior within a given month, fits best. More pacific Israeli opinion leads to more immediate Palestinian hostility toward Israelis. This response's direction suggests a negative feedback mechanism in which low-level conflict is maintained and momentum toward either all-out war or dramatic peace is slowed. In addition, a forecasting model including Jewish public opinion is shown to forecast ex ante better than a model without this variable.