Human rights studied as social representations in a cross-national context WILLEM DOISE 1 *, DARIO SPINI 1 and ALAIN CLE  MENCE 2 1 University of Geneva, Switzerland 2 University of Lausanne, Switzerland Abstract A questionnaire study using the 30 Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was conducted in 35 countries (N  6791 students). The basic assumption was that human rights can be studied as social representations following the model of Doise, Cle Âmence, & Lorenzi-Cioldi (1993). The existence of a shared meaning system con- cerning the 30 articles in dierent countries was demonstrated. Individual attitudes toward the whole set of rights were proven to be highly consistent. However, individuals diered systematically in beliefs about their own and the government's ecacy in having human rights respected. An individual-level and a pancultural analysis (Kenny & La Voie, 1985; Leung & Bond, 1989) converged in the de®nition of four groups of respondents: advocates (most favorable responses towards human rights), sceptics (less favorable responses), personalists (high personal involvement and scepticism about governmental ecacy) and governmentalists (low personal involvement and strong belief in governmental ecacy). Analyses of anchoring started either from assessing individual positionings or from maximizing between-country dierences. Individual-level analyses show that positionings are anchored in value choices as well as in perception and experience of social con¯icts. Pancultural analyses con®rm the importance of national context concerning the attitudes of scepticism or advocacy, personalism and governmentalism. Copyright # 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. CCC 0046±2772/99/010001±29$17.50 Received 19 June 1997 Copyright # 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Accepted 21 October 1997 European Journal of Social Psychology Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 29, 1±29 (1999) *Correspondence to: Willem Doise, Faculte de Psychologie, University of Geneva, 9, route de Drize, CH-1227 Carouge, Switzerland. e-mail doise@ibm.unige.ch Contract grant sponsor: Swiss National Research Fund. Contract grant number: 1114±037604.93, 1113±043160.95.