Political scientists frequently struggle to judge whether measures are valid and reliable enough for substantive research. Stand-alone assessment tools exist, but they are rarely combined in practice, and guidance aimed at data consumers—those who must decide whether to use existing measures—is limited. This article presents a practical, integrated approach for assessing measure quality and demonstrates it on prominent corruption indicators.
Many political science theories imply that relationships evolve over time, yet empirical work often ignores temporal heterogeneity or uses crude tests. Recent advances in change-point detection offer a better way to identify and characterize these shifts.
This analysis draws on the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project to track changes in civil-liberty equality for gender and ethnic groups across the period 1900–2015. Civil-liberty equality is measured separately for gender and excluded ethnic groups to capture shifts in legal and political treatment.
Data sets that quantify social-scientific concepts often rely on multiple experts to code latent, ordinal concepts. Reporting the simple average across experts is common practice, but experts can differ in both their reliability and how they interpret rating scales. These differences make the mean a potentially biased or inaccurate summary.