Data for Days
About the author: Mac Simpson ’23 is an FSI Global Policy Intern with World Justice Project. He is currently a rising junior studying Political Science at Stanford University.
When I wake up and begin work at 9 o’clock in the morning, my other coworkers have already been working for three hours. At 2 pm PST, they all log off for the day, and I am in my own time zone cocoon for the next three hours. While the time zone difference does not bother me (I’m just happy I don’t have to wake up at 6 am to begin work every morning), I do dream of the experience of working in the heart of Washington D.C., going up to coworkers to ask them questions rather than messaging them on Slack, sitting in a conference room discussing criminal justice in Malawi rather than looking at my laptop with BlueJeans running. Having performed remote research the summer prior, I knew what to expect a pandemic-era internship to look like. While I am more than grateful that I have the opportunity to work with the World Justice Project at all, the challenges of a remote internship are ever-present, and it makes me yearn for the days when we can all *safely* experience the joys of office life.
While I do wish that I had the opportunity to experience WJP in person, the work that I have been doing continues to be incredibly interesting. These past two weeks were crunch time, and was the pinnacle of all the work I had been doing for the first few weeks of the internship. The data that WJP had been collecting for months from 139 different countries had finally been obtained, cleaned, and prepped, and the challenge of WJP qualitative data checks began.
The Rule of Law Index looks at 8 different factors (all with different subfactors) in every country: constraints on government powers, absence of corruption, open government, fundamental rights, order and security, regulatory enforcement, civil justice, and criminal justice. Qualified respondents (usually professors and lawyers) as well as everyday people in these different countries fill out a survey that judges their perception of these factors in their home country. While this surmounts to a very large data set, it is our job to make sure that the scores, and more importantly changes to the scores from the prior year, accurately represent what happened in that country in the prior year. A hypothetical for example: we know Myanmar had a coup last year, but let’s say the factor one score increased by +.05. We know that the score most definitely should have decreased, so we flag it to be analyzed in further detail.
This is what my past few weeks have looked like: looking at easy countries such as Sweden and ones with more minutia and nuance like Afghanistan. Every country has different changes that are either reflected or not reflected by events in the past year, and it is my job to ensure whether the changes are justified or not. Not everything has been as simple and large scale as a coup in Myanmar, but trying to research things like delays in administrative proceedings in Thailand has been a little more difficult. Matching events to the data has been incredibly interesting and has opened my eyes to the nuances regarding rule of law that every country experiences, and I am looking forward to seeing the final data set.
