Understanding the Historical Forces Driving Expansions of Human Rights

Starting several centuries ago, in "European civilization" the criteria for who is accorded rights has been getting weaker and weaker. Stated more formally, the set of criteria for who is in the elite group and who is out of it have shrunk drastically over the past half millennium in those societies.  One of most puzzling features of history since the onset of the holocene is that it appears that this is the only instance in which rights have expanded so drastically.  
  
The first goal of this working group is to use all data sets that are available to try to confirm our refute that this process did in fact occur, just once, in the west starting several centuries ago, and is still ongoing, and to quantify the empirical dynamics of this process.
  
The second goal of this working group is to build formal models of what properties of a human society might stimulate such an expansion of rights over the long term, and what properties might lead to the reversal of a such a trend over the short term. While there is some reason to believe that a necessary condition for expansion of rights is sufficiently high wealth per capita, there are many other processes that contribute to the institutional social norms that are involved in ascribing rights to individuals in a society.

Our third goal is to build on the first two, to start to develop general theories for the expansion of human rights (or more formally stated, for the expansion of the set of criteria that determine who is in the "in-group" of society’s elite)  while testing them against data from specific historical epochs. For instance, rather than relate the expansion of human rights to wealth per capita, an alternative theory traces the evolution of human rights to the notion of a contract between the state and the individual, which originated with the theories of the English philosopher John Locke in a tradition of English common law including the Magna Carta. Yet another theory cites historical contingency as the reason for England becoming a crucial site for the development of human rights, with the bubonic plague decimating the peasantry and thus granting working people unprecedented bargaining power. This meeting was supported under SFI's Emergent Political Economies grant provided by the Omidyar Network.