Today, we released the PTS Scores based on the most recent human rights reports from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the U.S. State Department. The new scores released today cover last year’s events. As such, we now have PTS scores covering a 39 year period from 1976 to 2015 and 210 countries and territories. This release includes:
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160 PTS scores based on the 2016 Amnesty International Annual Report on the State of the World’s Human Rights.
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87 PTS scores based on the 2016 Human Rights Watch World Report.
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198 PTS scores based on the 2016 U.S. State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.
This latest release, which includes all scores going back to 1976, can be accessed here: Download.
The Data Table on the website and the PTS-App have been updated and also contain the latest scores.
Changes for this Release
Although the dataset will still be available in various formats (i.e., .xlsx, .dta, .RData, and .csv), we have adopted the country-year format across all versions. Specifically, our dataset is structured such that each row represents a particular country-year combination (e.g. Spain 2015). Columns represent the variables of interest.
- PTS scores based on Amnesty International reports are stored under the column PTS_A
- PTS scores based on Human Rights Watch reports are stored under the column PTS_H
- PTS scores based on State Department reports are stored under the column PTS_S
The dataset also contains cleaned and updated country names (Country), as well as completely overhauled country identifiers/codes.
- COW_Code_A: The Correlates of War Project (CoW) alphabetic country codes
- COW_Code_N: The Correlates of War Project (CoW) numeric country codes
- WordBank_Code_A: World Bank three letter country codes (ISO 3166-1 alpha-3)
- UN_Code_N: United Nation three digit numeric country codes (ISO 3166-1 numeric-3)
- Region: OECD region identifier
For comparability with past releases, we retained the a column containing the old country names (Country_OLD). Past releases (i.e., 2014 and 2015) of the PTS dataset can be found here: Data-Archive.
Upcoming Changes
Over the next few weeks, we hope to update the documentation for this and past data releases and add a complete codebook to accompany the dataset. Stay tuned!