Countries by Rule of Law: Number of Sources
Ghana ranks 1st with 16 sources contributing to its Rule of Law score in 2023, the highest count among 205 countries and territories covered. At the other end, eight territories including American Samoa, Andorra, and Bermuda each record just 1 source. The 15-point gap between top and bottom reflects how unevenly the underlying survey and expert data are distributed across countries.
Ranking 2023
Analysis
This metric counts the number of data sources used to construct each country's Rule of Law indicator under the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) framework. The source note defines governance as follows: 'The Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) are a research dataset summarizing the views on the quality of governance provided by a large number of enterprise, citizen and expert survey respondents in industrial and developing countries. Governance consists of the traditions and institutions by which authority in a country is exercised. This includes the process by which governments are selected, mo[nitored, and replaced].' The unit is an absolute count of sources. A higher number indicates more data inputs informing a country's score, which generally implies greater statistical reliability. The 2023 dataset covers 205 countries, with 100% of data points classified as official quality and no extreme outliers identified at the 3-standard-deviation threshold.
Sub-Saharan African countries dominate the top of the ranking. Ghana leads at rank 1 with 16 sources. Cote d'Ivoire, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania follow jointly at rank 2 with 15 sources each. Eleven countries share rank 5 with 14 sources, all of them African: Cameroon, Gambia, Kenya, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Togo, and Zimbabwe. This concentration suggests that enterprise and citizen survey programs have particularly broad coverage across African nations, resulting in more source inputs per country compared to most high-income or small-island economies.
Major economies and well-known governance performers rank notably lower than the top. The United States, Germany, France, and Singapore each record 10 sources, placing them at rank 85 alongside 35 other countries. The United Kingdom ranks 124th with 9 sources, the same count as Japan and Australia. Switzerland and Norway each record only 8 sources, placing them at rank 144 alongside countries such as Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen. This counterintuitive grouping reflects source count alone, not governance quality. Small and micro territories cluster at the bottom: eight jurisdictions at rank 198 record just 1 source each, including Andorra, Monaco, and San Marino.
The source count metric does not measure governance outcomes, institutional quality, or the rule of law itself. It only captures how many data inputs underpin a country's WGI score. A country with few sources may still have a high or low governance score; the source count affects precision and confidence intervals rather than the score's direction. Small island states and dependent territories systematically receive fewer sources due to limited survey coverage, which may affect the reliability of their governance estimates. The 1500% spread between the minimum value of 1 and the maximum of 16 underscores the uneven global distribution of underlying survey data. Users should treat low-source-count scores with greater caution when comparing countries across tiers.
Methodology
Metric: Rule of Law Number of Sources. Indicator code: RL.NO.SRC. Data source: World Bank World Development Indicators, drawing on the Worldwide Governance Indicators research dataset. Data year: 2023. Country count: 205. Coverage: 205 countries have data, exceeding the 80-country threshold. Recency: 100% of data points are from the last 7 years. Data quality: 100% of data points are classified as official, above the 70% threshold. Outliers: 0 extreme outliers detected at the 3-standard-deviation threshold. Volatility: average year-over-year change of 4.2%, well below the 50% threshold. The indicator counts the number of enterprise, citizen, and expert survey sources used to compute each country's Rule of Law governance score under the WGI framework. The source note definition reads: 'The Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) are a research dataset summarizing the views on the quality of governance provided by a large number of enterprise, citizen and expert survey respondents in industrial and developing countries. Governance consists of the traditions and institutions by which authority in a country is exercised. This includes the process by which governments are selected, mo[nitored, and replaced].' Values range from 1 to 16. Higher values indicate more source inputs and generally greater statistical confidence in the underlying score. The metric does not directly measure governance quality.