TY - JOUR
T1 - Measuring Policy Performance, Democracy, and Governance Capacities
T2 - A conceptual and methodological assessment of the Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI)
AU - Croissant, Aurel
AU - Pelke, Lars
N1 - Funding Information:
One source of systematic bias may be the leadership and funding of a project (Hawken & Munck, 2009 ; McMann et al., 2021 ). While some governance and democracy indices are primarily funded by government grants (e.g., Freedom House's Freedom Index; Freedom House, 2020 ), or by international financial organizations, which receive funding from several sources, including fees and contributions from member countries (e.g., World Bank's WGI), funding for the V‐Dem project comes from an international consortium of research agencies and donor organizations (V‐Dem Institute, 2021 ). In contrast, the SGI’s sole source of funding is the Bertelsmann Foundation, which is an independent foundation under private law based in Germany and holds the majority of capital shares in the Bertelsmann Group, one of the world's largest private media conglomerates. The Bertelsmann Stiftung describes itself as politically non‐partisan, though it has been the subject of criticism in the past for its political role and economic interests. The project is led by in‐house academics employed by the Bertelsmann Foundation and is supported by eight academic coordinators, including one of the authors, from universities mainly in Germany. In addition, five sector experts support the data generation process, also based at various universities. The leadership structure of the SGI project, the academic background of the coordinators and project leaders, as well as the financial independence of most involved researchers make organizational bias unlikely.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Authors. European Policy Analysis published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Policy Studies Organization.
PY - 2022/5/1
Y1 - 2022/5/1
N2 - This paper provides a critical assessment of the Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI) and compares it with other prominent indices that address specific components of governance: V-Dem, WGI, and BTI. We offer a comparative assessment of content validity of these governance measures, their data generation processes, and their convergent validity. We conclude that the SGI’s most important contribution is the conceptualization of policy performance as a discrete index. Other relative strengths are the theoretical embeddedness and the exclusion of irrelevant meanings of governance, and the conceptualization of three governance components (Governance, Policy Performance, and Democracy). However, in terms of geographic and temporal coverage, the SGI is clearly inferior to WGI and V-Dem. The handling of third-party statistical data, the absence of uncertainty scores, and the (a-theoretical) aggregation of different indicators are additional shortcomings of the SGI. Finally, the SGI’s iterative process of expert deliberation has merits but is prone to biases.
AB - This paper provides a critical assessment of the Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI) and compares it with other prominent indices that address specific components of governance: V-Dem, WGI, and BTI. We offer a comparative assessment of content validity of these governance measures, their data generation processes, and their convergent validity. We conclude that the SGI’s most important contribution is the conceptualization of policy performance as a discrete index. Other relative strengths are the theoretical embeddedness and the exclusion of irrelevant meanings of governance, and the conceptualization of three governance components (Governance, Policy Performance, and Democracy). However, in terms of geographic and temporal coverage, the SGI is clearly inferior to WGI and V-Dem. The handling of third-party statistical data, the absence of uncertainty scores, and the (a-theoretical) aggregation of different indicators are additional shortcomings of the SGI. Finally, the SGI’s iterative process of expert deliberation has merits but is prone to biases.
KW - Democracy
KW - Governance
KW - Policy Performance
KW - Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI)
KW - V-Dem
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85128744191&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1002/epa2.1141
DO - 10.1002/epa2.1141
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85128744191
SN - 2380-6567
VL - 8
SP - 136
EP - 159
JO - European Policy Analysis
JF - European Policy Analysis
IS - 2
ER -