It’s been quite a few years now that I have been teaching hundreds of students on the limitations of governance indicators, especially the ‘big data’ ones. As someone who was educated first as a scientist and only later as a social scientist, I have never quite felt comfortable with data that I did not collect myself. It seems like a day doesn’t go by without an NGO announcing a new index or a corporate consultancy selling some miracle forecast. Yet primary data collection in the field of governance is extremely scarce: because of problems with conceptualization, the overly ambitious goal of comparing countries by the hundreds rather than the tenths, and, therefore, the inability to meet the real costs of quality data production. Consequently, as governance scholars, we work mostly with the equivalent of ‘derivatives’ in finance. Somebody packed some […]