PUBLIC OPINION ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS SITUATION: REGIME, INFORMATION AND POLITICAL CUES

Abstract

In this research project, I intend to address the question of how the public views their country’s human rights situation and what factors potentially shape this judgment. While many in the academia explain why and how governments engage in human rights abuse, few works explore people’s on-the-ground perceptions of the human rights situation in their country context. Studying this phenomenon, however, may illuminate why strong demands for democracy are vocalised in some settings but generally absent in others, despite similar levels of human rights abuse. In this thesis, I test a new theory of human rights perception formation, which takes into account the informational context associated with a given regime type. I move away from the traditional division of states into democracies and non-democracies and apply a different information-based regime typology to argue that perceptions about human rights are heavily influenced by the evaluation of government performance, which in turn depends on the regime-produced informational context.