Why the Public Supports the Human Rights of Prisoners and Asylum Seekers: An Experimental Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What factors shape support for the human rights of prisoners and asylum seekers at the individual level? Although the human rights literature has expanded greatly in the last 30 years, comparatively little attention has been paid to (a) the many human rights outside of a very small set of physical or bodily integrity rights and (b) the role of public opinion. We build a theoretical model of various human rights as public opinion-related policy choices, developing the micro-foundations of public support for the human rights of vulnerable subpopulations. Drawing on the broader literature on public policy and international norms, we use experimental methods to test whether calls to rational effectiveness or international norm cascades improve support for the rights of prisoners and asylum seekers. Although we find baseline support for these rights in the United States and Canada, our findings also imply that rhetoric on the potential costs of human rights policy could reduce popular support, even when such policy is consistent with international norms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".