Advocacy output: Automated coding documents from human rights organizations

Human Rights Organizations (HROs) are very important actors in the promotion and protection of human rights, despite being far less powerful than the actors primarily reponsible for human rights abuses--states. Naming and Shaming is one of the tools most frequently employed by HROs in their efforts to increase respect for rights. This paper reviews the contributions and limitations of existing efforts to collect systematic data that measure the concept of shaming, and introduces a class of quantitative approaches that can be employed to generate data that measure shaming events. The paper proceeds to describe how the process of automated coding works and presents two new datasets measuring shaming in 1) a broad cross section of HROs, and 2) the international media coded using the approaches. The new datasets are compared with existing datasets to illustrate the utility of this approach. Finally, we introduce a way to measure the intensity of HRO shaming statements and describe how measures of intensity can be used to differentiate among approaches of HROs and gauge their effectiveness.