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Government Accountability Indicator

Description

This indicator measures country performance on the quality of government accountability and transparency, electoral processes, political pluralism and participation, free speech, and fair political treatment of all groups.

Countries are rated on the following factors:

  • the extent of government control of territory and citizen views of the government as legitimate;
  • the openness, transparency, and accountability of the government to its constituents between elections; government policies that reflect the will of the people;
  • freedom of speech and discussion;
  • the conduct of executive and legislative elections; polling; tabulation of votes; electoral laws; campaigning opportunities;
  • the ability of different political parties and political groupings to organize; the  political system’s responsiveness to the rise and fall of competing political parties and groupings;
  • the ability of the opposition to participate in the political process;
  • the participation of various demographic groups in political life; and
  • freedom from domination by the military, foreign powers, totalitarian parties, religious hierarchies, economic oligarchies, or any other powerful group in making personal political choices.

Relationship to Economic Growth

Although the relationship between government accountability and economic growth is complex, research suggests that government accountability is connected with growth and poverty reduction.4 The institutional structures that maintain accountable government can promote growth by increasing policy stability, cultivating higher rates of human capital accumulation, reducing levels of corruption, and encouraging higher rates of investment.5 The links between government accountability and shared prosperity are similarly complicated, but there is evidence that institutions that are accountable to their people are better at reducing economic volatility and provide a more consistent approach to mutual prosperity than those without such accountability mechanisms.6   

Methodology

Indicator Institution Methodology

This indicator comes from the Atlantic Council’s Freedom and Prosperity Index, https://freedom-and-prosperity-indexes.atlanticcouncil.org/, and The Bertelsmann Transformation Index (BTI), https://bti-project.org/. A country’s score on this indicator is the average of its normalized Atlantic Council Political Freedom score and its normalized BTI Political Transformation score.

  • Atlantic Council Freedom Index Political Subindex: The Atlantic Council assesses countries on measures of individual freedom and limitations on government imposition on citizen freedoms, open, clean and fair elections, rights to participate in the democratic process and hold their leaders accountable, and the constraints of the legislature on the executive.  The Atlantic Council’s methodology can be found here: https://freedom-and-prosperity-indexes.atlanticcouncil.org/about.
  • Political Transformation (Bertelsmann Transformation Index): The Political Transformation index of BTI measures the stability of the state, the political participation of its citizens, the strength of the rule of law, and the stability of its institutions.  Each of these components has several sub-components.  The data are a qualitative assessment by experts who assess each country on the different components of the index.  A full description of BTI’s methodology can be found here: https://bti-project.org/en/methodology.   

MCC Methodology

MCC has historically used the absolute threshold of 17 to determine whether countries are passing this indicator. To maintain this threshold, MCC normalizes both the Atlantic Council data and the BTI data to the former scale using a linear regression described below then averages the two sources together.

  • Atlantic Council : The Atlantic Council’s scores range from 0 to 100, where 0 is the least free and 100 is the most free.  In order to put these on a consistent scale, MCC uses the following equation to normalize the data: Normalized Atlantic Council = (0.5212913)(Atlantic Council) - 13.16596.7 This means that a score of 56 on The Atlantic Council’s political freedom subindex would translate into a normalized score of approximately 16.  
  • BTI Political Transformation: BTI’s scores range from 0 to 10, where 0 is the lowest and 10 is the highest.  In order to put these on a consistent scale, MCC used the following equation to normalize the data: Normalized BTI = (5.524729)(BTI) – 11.72903.8 This means that a score of 5 on BTI translates to a normalized score of approximately 15.9.

The overall score is then calculated as the simple average of the Normalized Atlantic Council Score and the Normalized BTI score. Government Accountability Score = (Normalized Atlantic Council + Normalized BTI)/2.  When one of the sub-sources is missing, the other is used.9  All values are reported based on the actual calendar year covered by the data.