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- Creators: Barrett, The Honors College
- Creators: Arizona Board of Regents
- Creators: Lauderdale, Pat
There is extensive analysis previously done on the US State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. Mainly, the literature investigates biases, topical attention shifts, and changes in the content and length of the reports over time. In aggregate, findings indicate that the State Department reports institutionalized, standardized, and converged with other reports. This honors thesis applies the expectations set by the previous literature to the analysis of reports from a singular country, Venezuela. Two Venezuelan presidential transitions and one US presidential transition provided the opportunity to qualitatively observe changes in reporting and potentially contextualize those changes with the effects of the presidential transitions. The prominent changes observed in the reporting during these periods include topical attention shifts related to democratization and elections in Venezuela and changes in reporting for minority communities.
- John F Kennedy
For over a century now, the United States has publicly professed a commitment to upholding human rights around the world, yet to this day economically supports numerous dictatorships and undemocratic regimes that flout human rights on a daily basis. The rhetoric of American politicians would imply that human rights and democracy are a priority in America's foreign policy, yet given US support for autocracies, both of these principles seem forgotten. If not respect for democracy and human rights, what is truly influencing America's relationship with these countries? I hypothesize that a country's resource availability will be the best predictive factor for its economic relationship with the US, followed by its military involvement with the US, and finally, human rights records will be the least predictive factor. The study found that a country's military cooperation with the US is the best predictive factor regarding our economic relationship, resource availability comes with a weak correlation, and human rights abuses very rarely substantively impact our economic relationships.