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Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft
Erschienen in: Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft 1/2012

01.09.2012 | Aufsätze

What do fragility indices measure?

Assessing measurement procedures and statistical proximity

verfasst von: Sebastian Ziaja

Erschienen in: Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft | Sonderheft 1/2012

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Abstract

This article examines nine fragility indices. Their content validity is assessed by reviewing conceptualization, measurement and aggregation methods. Their convergent/divergent validity is assessed via principal component analysis and multidimensional scaling. These techniques are capable of determing the dimensionality of and the statistical proximity within the examined sample of indices. Both the conceptual and the statistical analysis support the hypothesis that there is a group of “holistic” fragility indices which are of little use for investigating the causes and consequences of fragility. The remaining indices address more specific aspects of fragility and produce empirically distinguishable results.
Vorheriger Artikel Zuverlässig invalide – Indizes zur Messung fragiler Staatlichkeit
Nächster Artikel Die Vermessung des Regulatorischen Staates

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Fußnoten
1
Conceptual critiques of fragility indices can be found in Marshall 2008; Wulf and Debiel 2009; Call 2010; and Wennmann 2010.
 
2
Some of the most prominent critiques are Arndt and Oman 2006; Kurtz and Schrank 2007; Thomas 2007; Langbein and Knack 2010.
 
3
Some earlier parts of this article and more descriptive information on the indices can be found in the Users Guide on Measuring Fragility (Fabra Mata and Ziaja 2009).
 
4
See Bollen 1993 for such an approach applied to democracy indices.
 
5
See OECD 2008. For discussions of various terminologies, see Gros 1996 and Rotberg 2004.
 
6
An exception is the CIFP Fragility Index (Carment et al. 2009, pp. 84–89).
 
7
This article will not deal in greater detail with the issue of legitimacy; for the relationship between legitimacy and fragility, see Bellina et al. 2009; Call 2010.
 
8
The idea of relative capacity is, of course, not new; see, for example, Kugler and Domke (1986) who measure “relative political capacity” as actual over expected extraction of resources.
 
9
One could also start with Tilly’s (1985) concept of the state as a protection racket and arrive at a similar operationalization.
 
10
Fabra Mata and Ziaja (2009, pp. 109–111) provide a list of all indices reviewed for potentially being fragility indices.
 
11
For an assessment of the overall BTI index, see Müller and Pickel 2007.
 
12
The index is used for a map in a brochure and mentioned in the documentation of the methodology (Bertelsmann Stiftung 2007, 2008). The producers say, however, that they would construct a “proper index of state fragility” differently (personal communication).
 
13
It is, for example, used in the upcoming World Development Report “Conflict, Security and Development” (http://​wdr2011.​worldbank.​org/​) and by the International Monetary Fund (IMF 2010).
 
14
See Arndt 2008 on the organizational motivations for publishing governance indices.
 
15
This is the major reason why the World Bank uses the IDA Resource Allocation Index to measure fragility: for internal purposes, World Bank staff can draw on a time-series starting in the 1970s.
 
16
“Measurement” thus refers to measurement in the narrower sense, limited to the quantification of single components, while “measurement procedure” refers to measurement in the broader sense, including previous conceptualization and subsequent aggregation.
 
17
The literature on measuring democracy provides examples on how multi-dimensional concepts can be convincingly operationalized by building on a mature corpus of theory (e.g. Bollen 1993; Munck 2009).
 
18
For a detailed treatment on visualizing data in network graphs, see Krempel 2005.
 
19
With the exception of the IDA Resource Allocation Index and the Country Policy and Institutional Assessments, which have been moved closer to the other World Bank sources to group them together.
 
20
An exception is the WGI Political Stability Index.
 
21
A rather low bivariate correlation of 0.53 supports the MDS result. The advantage of MDS, however, is that all the different relationships can be grasped at once via the graphical display, dispensing of the need to comb through the correlation table row by row.
 
22
See Fabra Mata and Ziaja (2009, p. 32) for an overview of categorization methods applied by fragility indices. An excellent discussion on methodological choices, including a convincing standardization method, can be found in the Index of African Governance (Rotberg and Gisselquist 2008).
 
23
On nomological validation, see Adcock and Collier (2001, p. 542).
 
24
Collier and Levitsky (2009) use this term with respect to democracy concepts.
 
25
Coppedge (2002, p. 39) arrives at a similar conclusion with regard to democracy: “The highest priority for improving the measurement of democracy is therefore improving the measurement of disaggregated attributes of democracy”.
 
26
Call (2010) tries to apply this approach to less broadly defined “capacity”, “security” and “legitimacy gaps”.
 
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Metadaten
Titel
What do fragility indices measure?
Assessing measurement procedures and statistical proximity
verfasst von
Sebastian Ziaja
Publikationsdatum
01.09.2012
Verlag
VS-Verlag
Erschienen in
Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft / Ausgabe Sonderheft 1/2012
Print ISSN: 1865-2646
Elektronische ISSN: 1865-2654
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12286-012-0123-8

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