Accountability index

Question: To what extent is the ideal of government accountability achieved? Clarification: Government accountability is understood as constraints on the government's use of political power through requirements for justification for its actions and potential sanctions. We organize the sub-types of accountability spatially. Vertical accountability refers to the ability of a state's population to hold its government accountable through elections, horizontal accountability refers to checks and balances between institutions; and diagonal accountability captures oversight by civil society organizations and media activity. 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).