Suchergebnisse

AbstractHuman trafficking affects millions of people globally, disproportionately harming women, girls and marginalized groups. Yet one of the main sources of data on global trafficking, the annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Reports, is susceptible to biases because report rankings are tied to political outcomes. The literature on human rights measurements has established two potential sources of bias. The first is the changing standards of accountability, where more information and increased budgets change the standard to which countries are held over time. The second is political biases in reports, which are amended to comply with the interests of the reporting agency. This letter examines whether either of these biases influence the TIP Reports. In contrast to other country-level human rights indicators, the State Department issues both narratives and rankings, which incentivizes attempts to influence the rankings based on political interests. The study uses a supervised machine-learning algorithm to examine how narratives are translated into rankings, to determine whether rankings are biased, and to disentangle whether bias stems from changing standards or political interests. The authors find that the TIP Report rankings are more influenced by political biases than changing standards.

Record numbers of women, and in particular women of color, are gaining elective office across the country. This article explores how their presence in legislative bodies might make a difference in policy agendas and legislative advocacy, especially at the intersections of race and gender. Leveraging original datasets of Democratic lawmakers and the bills they sponsor in fifteen U.S. state houses in 1997 and 2005, we examine multiple forms of race–gender policy leadership and how it is tied to legislators' race–gender identity. Testing theories of intersectional representation, we find that women of color often are the most likely race–gender policy leaders. Indeed, our measures of race–gender policy leadership reveal the distinctive representational work of women of color, which traditional, single-axis measures of legislative activity on behalf of women or racial/ethnic minorities cannot.