between different scores on this scale at times left rather unclear and up to the respondent.<sup>10</sup> In contrast, the usefulness of outcome-based indicators is greatly enhanced by the extent to which the criteria for differing scores are clearly documented. The World Bank’s CPIA and the Freedom House indicators are good examples of outcome-based indicators based on expert assessments that provide a fairly specific documentation of the criteria used to assign specific scores on the indicators that they compile. And in the case of surveys, questions can be designed in ways that ensure that responses are easier to interpret: rather than asking respondents whether they think "corruption is widespread", on can also simply ask whether they have been solicited for a bribe in the past month.

We conclude this section contrasting rules and outcomes-based measures of governance with an example to illustrate some of the main advantages and disadvantages of the two types of measures. Figure 1 compares alternative indicators of democratic accountability, a key dimension of governance. On the horizontal axis we have a very broad outcome indicator, taken from the 2005 Voice of the People survey, a large cross-country household survey. It asks households to answer whether they think elections in their country are free and fair. On the vertical axis, the series in circles at the top is a rules-based indicator of the quality of electoral institutions, taken from Global Integrity. It consists of a factual assessment of the existence of a number of specific institutions related to elections, such as the existence of a legal right to universal suffrage, and the existence of an election monitoring agency.<sup>11</sup> A first lesson from this graph is that in some cases, rules-based measures of governance show remarkable little variation across countries, with all countries receiving scores close to 100, indicating perfect scores on the "de jure" basis of this important aspect of governance. For example, a legal right to vote exists in every country surveyed by Global Integrity as of 2005, and a statutorily-independent election monitoring agency exists in all but three

> 10 See King and Wand (2007) for a description of how this problem can be mitigated by the use of "anchoring vignettes" that seek to provide a common frame of reference to respondents to aid in the interpretation of the response scale.  The basic idea is to provide an understandable anecdote or vignette describing the situation faced by a hypothetical respondent to the survey, for example "Miguel frequently finds that his applications to renew a business license are rejected or delayed unless they are accompanied by an additional payment of 1000 pesos beyond the stated license fee".  Respondents are then asked to assess how big an obstacle corruption is for Miguel's business, using a 10-point scale.  Since all respondents use the scale to assess the same situation, this can be used to "anchor" their responses to questions referring to their own situation.

> 11 Measured as the average of 14 "in law" components of the Elections indicator of Global Integrity.  The other series on the graph is an average of the 20 "in practice" components of the same indicator.

14