Dr. James Franklin, Professor of Politics and Government at Ohio Wesleyan, has been awarded a Centennial Center Research Grant from the American Political Science Association to continue his research on how governments target different groups of people through human rights abuses.<\/p>\n
Franklin’s work distinguishes between two types of abuse: those aimed at political opponents, such as protesters, activists, and journalists, and those aimed at people who are not politically active, including criminal suspects and marginalized groups. Working with OWU student research assistants in a 2025 summer program, his team built a new dataset measuring both types of abuse across nearly every country in the world, drawing on human rights reports from Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department.<\/p>\n
Their early findings, presented at the International Studies Association’s annual conference earlier this year, turned up a striking pattern: abuses against non-political groups are, on average, more severe than politically targeted abuses, and that the two respond to different underlying causes. Political abuses tend to rise with civil conflict and fall in democracies, while non-political abuses are tied more closely to high crime rates and economic hardship, regardless of the country\u2019s form of government.<\/p>\n
The new funding will allow Franklin to hire two OWU student research assistants this fall to extend the dataset across additional years, capturing a longer period of global democratic expansion and backsliding. Students will be trained on a coding scale Franklin developed and gain hands-on experience with primary source research that feeds directly into his ongoing scholarship.<\/p>\n
This project builds on work Franklin began in a 2020 study of Latin American countries, now extended to a global scale.<\/p>\n
Congratulations to Dr. Franklin on this recognition of his scholarship, and on the opportunity it creates for OWU students to take part in meaningful research.<\/p>\n