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Political Concepts
A Working Paper Series of the Committee on Concepts and Methods
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| Julio Ríos-Figueroa & Jeffrey K. Staton, "Unpacking the Rule of Law: A Review of Judicial Independence Measures," September 2008 |
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| 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 rule 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. |
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C&M
The Committee on Concepts and Methods
International Political Science Association (IPSA)
Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas (CIDE)
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Col. Lomas de Santa Fe
CP 01210 Mexico, DF
Mexico
Phone +52/55/5727-9800
Copyright (c) 2005 Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas.
All rights reserved.
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