What makes Global Integrity unique? Below are some of the key principles that guide our work.

Global Integrity research is bottom-up and local.
Global Integrity staff does not assign scores to countries; our teams of local in-country experts do. Our role is to create a standard framework for assessing governance, tap into existing local research capacity, fund the field work, and publish the results. The Global Integrity Report and our other toolkits (such as the Local Integrity Initiative projects) are homegrown, locally-generated assessments, not Western desktop exercises.

Our credibility is based on start-to-finish transparency.
Everything we do is open to public scrutiny-the questions we ask, the fieldwork process, the teams we work with, even our organization's financial reports. That commitment helps to explain why even those governments assessed negatively tend to agree with our results. The raw scores, the supporting commentary, and references are all published and easy to use. To us, transparent methodology means more than just publishing equations: it also has to be presented clearly enough for all stakeholders to understand.

Our work is solution-oriented and actionable.
Isolated numbers that rank countries according to "corruption" or "governance" are not particularly useful when it comes to doing the hard work of designing and implementing reforms. Our Integrity Indicators provide quantitative data across more than 300 indicators of government accountability, transparency, and anti-corruption mechanisms. The breadth and detail of our data allows local stakeholders - not Global Integrity - to identify points of intervention and take specific steps toward improved governance.

We use expert assessments, not opinion polls.
While polls can be highly useful in the right circumstances, you don't need a national survey to determine whether a country has a Freedom of Information law or if that law is effective in guaranteeing citizen access to government information. Global Integrity's quantitative data is the result of assessments carried out by a carefully vetted group of knowledgeable people. We do not use surveys. Instead we ask narrow, carefully targeted questions and require our researchers to support their assessments with referencing and narrative explanations.

Numbers are an entry point, never the whole story.
Corruption and governance are complex, layered issues. Quantitative data produces convenient summaries and can allow for powerful statistical analysis. But anyone using these numbers must be grounded in the political, economic and cultural experiences of each country. By using journalists and social scientists to both report on and research the full scope of these issues, Global Integrity combines the strengths of both quantitative and qualitative approaches.

We employ peer review and transparency to limit personal biases.
Personal biases, real or perceived, can undermine any expert assessment. All of our data and reporting is blindly reviewed by teams of local and outside experts to ensure consistency, quality, and richness of the final information. We never rely on a single expert; our country teams typically comprise 6 to 10 skilled researchers and journalists. When disagreement exists within a team, we publish all viewpoints, allowing readers to see the complexity of the issues and understand how we arrived at the final assessment.

Asking fact-based questions bypasses ideological disputes.
While a team approach reduces personal biases, what about a widely held ideological bias? Our approach avoids this by reducing a fuzzy construct ("Integrity") into specific, measurable outcomes ("In practice, do members of the legislature disclose their assets?"). Highly specific fact-based indicators can be supported by objective evidence. As a result, while we frequently see heated debate over the implications of our work, our source data is often embraced by all parties to that debate.

Every country is rated to the same standard.
We understand that human history has created a world of deep inequalities. But our expectations are universally high: we believe all nations, rich and poor, are capable of open and accountable government. Conversely, no government gets a free pass: we apply the same scrutiny to the West that we do to the developing world.

For a complete and detailed description of the methodology behind our Integrity Indicators, see the Methodology section of the Global Integrity Report. See also Marianne Camerer's "Measuring Public Integrity" paper in the January 2006 edition of the Journal of Democracy.

Camerer, Marianne. Measuring Public Integrity. Journal of Democracy 17:1 (2006) (c) National Endowment for Democracy and the Johns Hopkins University Press. Reproduced with premission of the Johns Hopkins University Press.