Security threats and fragile commitments: Stress-testing German support for human rights at home and abroad.

• Applicants: Professorin Sabine Carey, Ph.D.; Professorin Dr. Katrin Paula
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 521584079

This project investigates whether and how support for human rights can be strengthened in times of crisis. Across different innovative survey experiments fielded on the German adult population, we explore theoretically and empirically how support for human rights is shaped by potential threats people might be faced with, the types of rights that could be constrained to tackle the threat, and by exposure to deliberative arguments about the trade-off between security and rights.We study the nature and the source of the security threat. We distinguish between a domestic political threat in the form of a potential terrorist attack and a non-political threat in the form of the Corona pandemic, joining largely disparate research on terrorist threats and health risks. The terrorist threat varies by whether it emanates from a right-wing extremist group or an Islamist group. To incorporate an international perspective, we evaluate attitudes toward a human rights-oriented foreign policy under costly scenarios in the context of an international threat, such as the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine.By testing the malleability of attitudes towards different rights under the same threat scenarios and across different threat scenarios, we generate new insights on which rights are seen as more or less contestable by different societal groups and individuals, using different arguments in support for human rights. Within the domestic context, we select four basic human rights: attitudes towards physical integrity rights (captured as freedom from police violence), and attitudes towards rights that are at the heart of a lively democratic discourse (freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and privacy rights). This selection represents a diverse range of rights that reflect core democratic values but have increasingly been questioned in Western democracies. To compare attitudes towards human rights at home and abroad, we explore how different societal groups evaluate trade-offs between a foreign policy that actively supports basic rights to life and freedom in another country, versus minimizing economic and security threats at home by avoiding potentially risky involvements in international affairs in support of these rights.Through a combination of survey and experimental methods, we map attitudes to human rights at home and abroad, test the fragility of these commitments when their universality and unconditionality are contested, and assess whether normative or instrumental arguments can bolster citizens' defence of their basic rights and of the role of human rights in Germany’s foreign policy. To capture the deliberative potential of these arguments, we include an innovative video treatment in which respondents watch an ongoing debate between proponents on different sides of the classic rights vs. security trade-off. This offers an important methodological innovation to better understand how exposure to deliberative argumentation can change people's attitudes

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Robert Johns, Ph.D.