Initiatives which are intended to reduce the risk of a terrorist attack may impact not only civil liberties including privacy, but civil rights or equality as well. In the present paper, we consider conceptual tradeoffs among attitudes towards security, civil liberties and civil rights, and examine the psychometric structure of these attitudes in both congressional ratings and survey data. An e...

In the tradition of research on political tolerance and democratic rights in context, this study uses a national survey of Americans conducted shortly after the September 11, 2001 attack on America to investigate people’s willingness to trade off civil liberties for greater personal safety and security. We find that the greater people’s sense of threat, the lower their support for civil liberti...

Skepticism prevails among a substantial number of economists over a possible connection between civil liberties and the level of economic activity. Until now, empirical research on economic growth has found mixed evidence on the influence of civil liberties. Disaggregation of the Freedom House Civil Liberties Index allows a fresh empirical look at the effect of human rights on long-term growth ...

For the past two hundred to three hundred years, science has played a major role in the development of western culture. Societies have capitulated to the demands of "progress" and have disregarded the costs as expedients to the industrial revolution (Etzioni, 1968, p. 208). Unfortunately, the costs have mounted quietly, and perhaps because the awareness has been so long delayed, there is a stro...

Empirical studies often use Freedom House ratings for Political Rights and/or Civil Liberties as institutional proxies for the degree of democracy. In this study, Granger-causality tests are used which reveal that Political Rights tend to precede Civil Liberties, but not the reverse, in a panel data set of former Soviet Republics. For transition nations, Freedom House also publishes a separate ...

The opinion pieces that constitute this month’s ‘Talking Point’ address the old conflict between the enforcement of public health measures and the inevitable infringements of individual rights and liberties that are the result. The task of the ‘neutral commentator’ is made difficult by the fact that the authors are not particularly at odds with each other. George Annas argues that compulsory en...