The Global Integrity Index is different from other governance and corruption indices in important ways.
First, no one else publishes quantitative data on key national-level anti-corruption mechanisms. The Global Integrity Index does not measure the disease of corruption, but rather the medicine that citizens and governments are using to fight it: openness, accountability, and citizen oversight. Because of this, it is an inherently solution-oriented tool that provides an actionable roadmap for reform.
This approach avoids the typical frustration often experienced by local stakeholders - both in and outside of government - who feel they are unable to make an impact on their country's scores on various international indices. Because of its highly disaggregated nature, a discussion of the Global Integrity Index naturally flows to a discussion of the more than 300 Integrity Indicators that serve as its source material. These highly specific questions and answers, framed by unique scoring criteria and blindly reviewed by a panel of local experts, serve as a road map to small, incremental steps that can be taken towards improved governance. Click here to download the Integrity Indicators (.XLS).
Other unique features of the Global Integrity Index and Integrity Indicators include:
The data are generated by local experts, not international analysts. The tens of thousands of Integrity Indicators generated each year that comprise the overall country assessments and Global Integrity Index are scored by local in-country researchers and journalists. This gives the results a bottom-up authenticity rarely seen in international comparative governance data.
We do not use perception surveys or polling; each country assessment that feeds into the overall Index is supported by references and unique scoring criteria. Many Integrity Indicators for a country include narrative explanations of the actual scoring, increasing reliability and encouraging follow-up research and debate.
We do not use third-party data; all of our research is conducted by our in-country experts using identical methodologies. Generating the Integrity Indicators and Global Integrity Index is much more than a simple spreadsheet exercise; it involves actual in-country fieldwork.
We do not use any "closed" source material; everything we do — from scoring guidelines to disputes that arise out of our peer review process — is transparent and open to public scrutiny.
When we say "current year" data, we really mean current data. It is unfortunately common in many international indices that a "yearly" report uses only the latest information available for a country, even if that information is several years old. Our annual national datasets are scored and assembled in the year they are labeled.
Lastly, Global Integrity never directly assigns scores to countries; instead, we simply aggregate the more than 300 specific questions and answers for each country (the Integrity Indicators) into various sub-category-, category-, and country-level scores. The Integrity Indicator scores are locally researched and peer reviewed.
Click here to download A Users' Guide to Measuring Corruption, our joint publication with the UNDP Oslo Governance Centre.
Click here for more on our methodology.
Click here for more on our organization's approach to research.
Click here for more on our organization's unique operations.
Global Integrity uses a