| dc.description.abstract |
The rule of law has become a favored solution to crucial substantive problems in the social sciences. Several measures have been created to capture the concept; however, we lack a good sense of which of the numerous ones are appropriate to particular research projects. We argue that a broad, multidimensional concept of rule of law should be abandoned and replaced with the individual concepts from which it is constituted. Focusing on judicial independence, a central component of the rules of law concept, we evaluate the validity of thirteen measures that have been used in the literature. We find considerable support for the validity of a number of de facto measures of independence, less support for de jure measures, and strong evidence that de facto and de jure measures are tapping into distinct concepts. Finally, we highlight a significant missing data problem in these data and suggest how this problem is compounded by common practices used to demonstrate robustness. |
