Explaining Cross-National Differences in Adherence to the Rule of Law

Abstract

Surprisingly few studies have attempted to explain present-day variations in respect for the rule of law. Moreover, those that have attempted to do so based on cross-national statistical analysis (Andrews and Montinola, 2004; Barro, 2012; Joireman, 2004; Olsson and Hansson, 2011; Rigobon and Rodrik, 2005) have largely disregarded historical aspects of this variation and have — as we have noted several times — refrained from assessing their claims against several rule of law measures. Against this backdrop, we set out to achieve two purposes. First, and most generally, we use multivariate OLS-regressions to investigate whether a series of explanatory factors shed light on contemporary variations in respect for the rule of law. Here, we include measures of socio-economic development, country size, ethnic fractionalization, natural resource abundance, common law systems, colonial heritage, and dominant religion in the model. We focus interchangeably on the different measures of the rule of law described and reviewed in Part II. Our aim is to disentangle whether different attributes of the rule of law are explained by the same or by different explanatory factors, including whether the explanatory factors have uniform effects across the different rule of law measures.