Respect for Physical-Integrity Rights in the Twenty-First Century: Evaluating Poe and Tate's Model 20 Years Later

Poe and Tate's 1994 study is likely the most influential in the quantitative study of human rights, serving as a foundation for a great deal of scholarship. In this article, we briefly consider the impact this article had on academic research on state repression, particularly in relation to democracy. We then empirically revisit Poe and Tate's model using a longer timeframe, updated method of estimation, improved measure of state repression, improved measures of some independent variables, and a spatial indicator. We stratify our results by specific physical-integrity right, world region, and time, finding variation in the associates of state repression across types of rights and world regions but stability over time. Finally, like Davenport and Armstrong (2004) , we find a threshold where democracy's protective effects appear to begin, but this threshold differs across specific types of rights and that democracy may have rights-protective effects at lower levels than expected.