The Politics of Scrutiny in Human Rights Monitoring: Evidence from Structural Topic Models of U.S. State Department Human Rights Reports

Human rights monitoring reports play important roles both in the international human rights regime and in productions of human rights data. However, human rights reports are produced by organizations subject to formal and informal pressures that may influence the topics considered salient for attention and scrutiny. We study this potential using structural topic models (STMs), a method used for identifying the latent topical dimensions of texts and assessing the effects of covariates on these dimensions. We apply STMs to a corpus of 6,298 State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices (1977-2012), identifying a plausible set of topics including killings and disappearances, freedoms of expression and movement, and labor rights, among others. We find that these topics vary markedly both over time and space. We also find that while U.S. domestic politics play no systematic role in shaping topic prevalence, U.S. allies tend to receive more attention to violations of physical integrity rights. These results challenge extant research, and illustrate the usefulness of STM methods for future study of foreign policy documents. Our findings also highlight the importance of topical attention shifts in documents that monitor and evaluate countries.人权监测报告在国际人权机制与人权数据生成领域均具有重要作用。然而，人权报告的撰写主体易受到正式与非正式压力的影响，这可能会左右其认定为值得关注与审视的议题方向。本研究采用结构主题模型（Structural Topic Models，STMs）开展相关探究——该方法可用于识别文本的潜在主题维度，并评估协变量对这些维度的影响。我们将STMs应用于1977年至2012年间的6298份《美国国务院人权国别实践报告》语料库，识别出一系列合理的主题类别，涵盖杀戮与失踪、言论自由与行动自由、劳工权利等诸多领域。研究发现，上述主题在时间与空间维度上均呈现显著差异。此外，尽管美国国内政治对主题出现频率未产生系统性影响，但美国盟友往往会获得更多针对其侵犯人身完整权行为的关注。本研究结果对既有相关研究形成挑战，同时也证明了STM方法在未来外交政策文件研究中的应用价值。我们的研究发现还凸显了在监测与评估他国的文件中，主题关注度偏移的重要性。