by Karl Kurtz
An article in today's New York Times, "Contention over rankings of African nations", comparing African countries on a variety of measurements of governmental performance, generated a lot of discussion among our NCSL staff who have worked in African countries on legislative strengthening projects in recent years. Here is a sampling of today's e-mail traffic among our staff:
Other than two measures of the fairness of legislative elections, there's nothing about parliaments in this index.
I've been thinking about what I would have included in my own measurement of African governments.
Check out the nifty interactive chart in the Ibrahim report.... One of the coolest things on the Ibrahim website is the graphical interface table that allows you to plot different variables. It's way cool.
Interesting that Algeria makes the top 10 on one of the indexes. It scores well on safety and security and human development and not so well on sustainable economic opportunity and participation and human rights.
Good to see Ghana up there in the rankings. Nigeria...not so good.
From the Rotberg report: "Nigeria, despite its vast oil wealth, suffers as in previous years by weak scores for safety and security, participation, rule of law, and human development."
Egypt ranks high in the overall rankings but toward the bottom in human rights and participation. One factor in that score is an expert analysis of whether elections are fair and whether elected officials have actual governing authority, so their rubber stamp parliament surely pulls them down. They get pulled to the top in overall score by the measure of health and education.
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