Political terror scale

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The Political Terror Scale is a yearly measure of state-inflicted political terror. It was developed in the early 1980s by researchers at Purdue University and is currently managed by Mark Gibney of the University of North Carolina at Asheville.^[1]

Originally, only 59 countries were coded for within the database between 1976 and 1983. In 1984, Mark Gibney took over as manager of the database and expanded the list of countries coded to 180 and the range of years to the most recent years available (currently 2012).^[1]

The Political Terror Scale uses three sources to code each country: the United States Department of State's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, the Annual Report from Amnesty International, and the World Report from Human Rights Watch.^[2] The database can be viewed and downloaded from its website.