Marketplace of indicators: inconsistencies between country trends of measures of the rule of law

ABSTRACT Social scientists can choose from among multiple quality of governance indicators which use different conceptualizations of governance and its components, rely on different data sources, and employ different aggregation and scaling techniques. Despite all differences, these indicators are commonly found to be strongly correlated, which makes the choice of indicator for a given analysis seem inconsequential. We focus on rule of law indicators to demonstrate that correlations among them are indeed high when comparing across countries or using pooled country-year data sets, but are surprisingly low – sometimes even negative – within countries. Given the increased interest of researchers in longitudinal analyses with country time series, low agreement between country time trends in the rule of law is concerning. We illustrate the problem with an analysis of the effect of rule of law on popular support for democracy, which leads to opposite conclusions depending on which measure of rule of law is used.