An Evaluation of Cross-National Measures of Judicial Independence. [PDF]

Judicial independence plays an increasingly important part in theoretical and empirical analysis on substantive problems in the social sciences. Consequently, a number of measures aiming to capture subtle varieties of this concept have proliferated over the past decade. We provide a conceptual map of judicial independence and evaluate the content, construct, and convergent validity of thirteen cross-national measures. We find support for the validity of a number of de facto and less support for de jure judicial independence measures. We highlight a significant missing data problem in these data and suggest how this problem is compounded by common practices used to demonstrate robustness.