Evaluating Extant Rule of Law Measures

Abstract

A number of recent works have provided systematic templates for constructing and assessing cross-national indicators (e.g., Adcock and Collier, 2001; Munck and Verkuilen, 2002; Goertz, 2006). Nonetheless, ‘uncertainty over the quality of the cross-national data we use continues to be pervasive in many areas of research’ (Mudde and Schedler, 2010, p. 411) as the proposed guidelines have only to a limited extent disseminated to the actual practices of scholars engaged in comparative research (Coppedge et al., 2011; Munck, 2009; Møller and Skaaning, 2011). One of the most striking examples is to be found in the rule of law research agenda.