Vertical accountability index

Question: To what extent is the ideal of vertical government accountability achieved? Clarification: Vertical accountability captures the extent to which citizens have the power to hold the government accountable. The mechanisms of vertical accountability include formal political participation on part of the citizens --- such as being able to freely organize in political parties --- and participate in free and fair elections, including for the chief executive. Scale: We provide two versions of this index. The first is the normalized output from the the hierarchical latent variable analysis. It is on an unbounded interval scale. The second, denoted by *_osp, is a version of this output which we scale using a standard normal cumulative distribution function. It is thus scaled low to high (0-1).