Pros and cons of a composite human rights index

A composite human rights score is an attractive proposition. It means you could produce a colour-coded map showing a gradient of country performance on human rights. That would be nice, right? But can human rights really be summarised into a single dimensional scale? This post discusses the pros and cons.

The map pictured above is from the WHO Global Health Observatory, and it shows the share of adults defined as obese in 2016. Unless you’re interested in obesity in small countries like Fiji (which don’t really show up on a map), this is a great use of a chloropleth map because it shows global country performance on a single indicator.

By contrast, human rights are not uni-dimensional, so we produce country summary scores for three categories of rights that are not highly correlated with one another (Economic and Social Rights, Safety from the State, and Empowerment Rights).

We often get asked how these three category scores should be aggregated into a single country score.

Cons

To illustrate the challenges of doing this, consider China. China’s Economic and Social Rights Performance score is reasonably high, but its Safety from the State Performance, and Empowerment Performance scores are very low. Averaging the three scores for China gives a single score that is rather meaningless (in a sense that it doesn’t really tell you what is going on or how the country is performing).

For this reason, we caution against combining the scores into a single index using a simple aggregation method such as averaging. Depending on your intended use of the scores, we recommend that the three component scores (or only one or two of them if they are seen as of particular importance) be separate inputs into your own models.

Pros

We understand that sometimes you have no choice. For example, if you are complying with a disclosure regime that treats human rights as uni-dimensional, then you need a single metric on which to classify countries as above or below some threshold.

For situations like this, we want you to have the data tools you need and we certainly have the brains to think about the best way to do it. So the next Rights Intelligence data update (target release date: October 2023) will include a composite score… produced using a methodology that we approve of, with suitable caveats attached.

Update (December 2023)

You can now read about how we resolved this question in our article Introducing our Composite Human Rights Scores.