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 ninth factor measuring Informal Justice, but it is not used 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.)  

The following dataset presents the overall, factor, and sub-factor scores for the countries and jurisdictions included in each iteration of the Index since 2012, where 1 signifies the highest score and 0 signifies the lowest score.  

Please note that, before 2015, scores across iterations of the Index are not strictly comparable. This is primarily due to two reasons. First, countries are scored relative to other countries in the sample. Ninety-seven (97) countries/jurisdictions were included in the 2012-2013 dataset. Ninety-nine (99) countries/jurisdictions were included in 2014. One hundred and two (102) countries/jurisdictions were included in 2015. One hundred and thirteen (113) countries/jurisdictions were included in 2016 and 2017-2018. One hundred and twenty-six (126) countries/jurisdictions are included in 2019. One hundred and twenty-eight (128) countries/jurisdictions are included in 2020. One hundred and thirty-nine (139) countries/jurisdictions are included in 2021. Second, the construction of the indicators and the underlying survey instruments were slightly revised with the publication of each report during those years. For these reasons, we ask all users to use caution in comparing scores over time, though it can be noted that indicator construction and WJP's survey instruments have remained relatively stable since 2015, so comparisons can be made with more confidence from 2015-2021.


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