World Justice Project

The World Justice Project (WJP) Rule of Law Index® is a quantitative assessment tool designed by the World Justice Project to offer a detailed and comprehensive picture of the extent to which countries adhere to the rule of law in practice. Factors of the WJP Rule of Law Index include: 1. Constraints on Government Powers 2. Absence of Corruption 3. Open Government 4. Fundamental Rights 5. Order and Security 6. Regulatory Enforcement 7. Civil Justice 8. Criminal Justice (Data is collected for a 9th factor, Informal Justice, but it is not included in aggregated scores and rankings. This is due to the complexities of these systems and the difficulties in measuring their fairness and effectiveness in a matter that is both systematic and comparable across countries.) Every year WJP collects data from representative samples of the general public and legal professionals to compute the index scores. The data, once collected, are carefully processed to arrive at country-level scores. The respondent level data is first edited to exclude partially-completed surveys, suspicious data, and outliers. Individual answers are then mapped on to the 44 sub-factors of the index. Answers are coded so that all values fall between 0 (least rule of law) and 1 (most rule of law), and aggregated at country level using the simple, or unweighted, average of all respondents. Note: 2012-2013 values given for year 2013 and 2017-2018 given for year 2018.