What CIRI was
From 2004 to 2014, the Cingranelli–Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Data Project produced annual, standards-based measures of government respect for 15 internationally recognized human rights, covering 1981 through 2011. It was founded and co-directed by David L. Cingranelli (Binghamton University, SUNY) and David L. Richards (University of Connecticut), with K. Chad Clay (University of Georgia) joining as a third co-director in 2013. The project was supported by the National Science Foundation, the World Bank, GTZ, and the institutions of its directors.
CIRI’s design choices are the reason it was adopted so widely, and they are the reason CIRIGHTS keeps them:
- Standards-based coding from public sources. Scores come from the U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, supplemented by Amnesty International’s Annual Report for physical integrity rights. Anyone can go back to the source document.
- Practices, not conditions. CIRI scored what governments and their agents did, not the overall human rights situation in a country, which is shaped by many actors a government does not control.
- A common legal standard for every country. Scores are not adjusted for population, wealth, or circumstance. Non-derogable rights are non-derogable everywhere.
- Transparent, replicable rules. The coding manual is public, so a disagreement about a score is a disagreement that can be settled by reading the source material.
CIRI data were used in more than 170 countries by scholars, students, policymakers, and analysts at over 400 organizations. That base of users is exactly why it matters that the project’s successor be easy to find and easy to switch to.
Why CIRI stopped, and what happened next
CIRI released its final data in 2014 and produced no scores after the 2011 country-year. Maintaining a dataset of this kind is expensive and, in the ordinary incentive structure of the discipline, largely uncredited work. Coding one year of data means reading and scoring thousands of country reports.
Rather than let the series lapse, David Cingranelli, Mikhail Filippov, and Skip Mark continued coding using the CIRI methodology, and the result became the CIRIGHTS Data Project, now based at the University of Rhode Island in collaboration with Binghamton University. David L. Richards — a CIRI co-founder — rejoined the project, and is developing new measures of employment discrimination by identity group and a reconceptualized measure of torture.
CIRIGHTS is not a competitor to CIRI or a fork of it. It is the same project, continued by an overlapping group of people, using the same rules.
What carries over unchanged
For most of the CIRI indicators, CIRIGHTS is a drop-in replacement:
- The same primary sources — USSD Country Reports, plus Amnesty International for physical integrity rights.
- The same country-year unit of analysis.
- The same scoring scales. The 0–2 ordinal scale (0 = frequent violations, 1 = some violations, 2 = no reported violations) is unchanged, as is the 0–3 scale for women’s political and economic rights and the 0–8 Physical Integrity Rights Index.
- The same scoring protocol: coders work independently, are blind to existing scores, use only the report for the year being coded, and document their reasoning for reconciliation.
- In most cases, the same variable names, so existing code often runs with minimal changes.
The crosswalk table below lists every CIRI variable and its CIRIGHTS equivalent, and flags the handful of cases where the mapping is not one-to-one.
What is new
Coverage. CIRI covered 1981–2011 and omitted many small-population states — roughly a quarter of the world’s countries. CIRIGHTS covers every country in the world, and extends the series by more than a decade.
Scope. CIRI measured 15 rights. CIRIGHTS measures more than 70, adding:
- Human rights NGO freedom
- The right to a fair trial, scored separately in law and in practice
- Human trafficking, in law and in practice
- Brutality-based mass atrocity, and its intensity
- Women’s social rights, scored separately in law and in practice
- Prisoners’ rights
- Freedom from discrimination in hiring and treatment at work
- The rights of Indigenous peoples, across eight separate measures
- A full set of labor rights — unionization, collective bargaining, forced labor, child labor, minimum wage, occupational safety and health, and working hours — each scored in law and in practice, building on the WorkR project (Barry, Cingranelli, and Clay 2022)
Law versus practice. Several rights are now scored twice: what a government promises, and what it does. The gap between them is itself a finding.
New indices. CIRIGHTS introduces a measure of repression that combines physical integrity rights, due process, and First Amendment rights — closer to how most of the literature actually defines repression than a physical-integrity index alone. It also introduces an overall human rights index built from 25 rights, reported both as a score and as a letter grade.
Why the expansion matters. Human rights research has concentrated heavily on physical integrity rights, largely because that is what was measured well. Theories about human rights are routinely tested with measures of repression. Work on human rights substitution suggests that rights are interrelated, and that gains on one dimension can mask losses on another — a claim that has been difficult to test without measures of the other dimensions. Labor rights have declined globally in these data. Child labor has improved globally even as protections are being rolled back in parts of the United States. None of that is visible in a physical-integrity index.
Comparability for replication users
For most purposes, the CIRI and CIRIGHTS scores are the same. We have filled in missing data and expanded temporal coverage. However, we have also gone back and changed scores if we have found a mistake. This may result in small changes with regard to replicability. These changes were quite small and occurred as part of our effort to improve the data quality.
CIRIGHTS revises earlier country-year scores when a later report contains new information about an earlier year. If you find a score you believe is wrong under our published rules, tell us — with the rule and the source passage — and we will correct it. Every score is traceable to a public document, which is the whole point.
How to cite
When using the dataset:
Mark, Skip, Mikhail Filippov, and David Cingranelli. “CIRIGHTS: Quantifying respect for all human rights.” Human Rights Quarterly 46, no. 2 (2024): 264-286.
Mark, Skip, David Cingranelli, Mikhail Filippov, and David L. Richards. “The CIRIGHTS data project scoring manual V2. 11.06. 23.” Available at SSRN 4625036 (2023).
If you use torture, disappearance, political imprisonment, extrajudicial killing, free speech, free association, religious freedom, judicial independence, women’s political rights, women’s economic rights, freedom of domestic movement, freedom of foreign movement, or electoral self-determination, also cite:
Cingranelli, David L., and David L. Richards. “The Cingranelli and Richards (CIRI) human rights data project.” Human rights quarterly 32, no. 2 (2010): 401-424.
If you use the right to unionize, bargain collectively, minimum wage, child labor, forced labor, reasonable limitation on working hours, or occupational health and safety, also cite:
Barry, Colin M., David L. Cingranelli, and K. Chad Clay. “Labor rights in comparative perspective: The WorkR dataset.” International Interactions 48, no. 2 (2022): 327-344.
The full scoring manual is also citable: Mark, Cingranelli, Filippov, and Richards, The CIRIGHTS Data Project Scoring Manual, available at SSRN.
Questions
Skip Mark, University of Rhode Island — skipmark@uri.edu. We answer questions about the data, and we are glad to hear from anyone who thinks a score is wrong.