| Many democracies throughout the developing world have representative government constituted through free and fair elections and yet struggle to provide good governance for its citizens. Rule of law is often invoked as a palliative but remains a heavily contested concept in the legal, political, and policy sciences. Evidence indicates that robust rule of law has positive implications for economic growth, democracy, and well-being more generally. However, a small portion of the literature has focused on revealing the determinants of the rule of law. Guided by pragmatic theory, this study attempts to answer two essential questions: 1) what is rule of law and a proper way of conceptualizing and operationalizing it? and 2) what are the determinants of rule of law and good government? This study provides a conceptual treatment of the rule of law and introduces rule of law as presumptive legitimacy or the idea that law, due process, and legal/political institutions are recognized and justified to be a right and proper authority by both citizens and state agents alike. This paper employs country-level data with a sample of 193 countries, drawn from a variety of sources, and utilizes the World Bank Worldwide Governance Indicators to operationalize the concept of presumptive legitimacy. To test this seemingly unobservable concept of presumptive legitimacy, a latent factor framework is employed in both cross-sections and longitudinally to test its validity and stability and over time using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and cross-classified random effects latent growth models, respectively. In addition, multiple-indicator multiple-cause (MIMIC) models are used to test the exogenous effects of factors identified by theory to have an effect on rule of law. The results of this study find that greater localized autonomy at the municipal level, fewer restrictions on citizens' ability to create legal organizations, higher levels of productivity, education, and health outcomes, and constraints on national government all have a strong positive association with presumptive legitimacy, controlling for other factors. Conversely, state control over oil resources and the interaction of constraints on national government and localized autonomy have a strong negative relationship with presumptive legitimacy. |
