Indexene has already been field-tested. The panelists assembled in Ranking the World: Grading States as a Tool for Global Governance have collectively declared it safe for social and political consumption, although with reservations. (The chapter by Nehal Bhuta on “Measuring Stateness, Ranking Political Orders: Indices of State Fragility and State Failure,” pp. 85–111, comes close to advocating prohibition.) They have expressed some doubts about its ingredients, its sideeffects, and its efficacy. The cure is supposed to be consistent, transparent, impartial, scientific, efficient, and, I would add, appealing to the policymaking consumer (p. 178). Almost unanimously, they have noted that the components of indices are often assembled intuitively, that is, without theoretical guidance and redundantly, that is, counting the same thing more than once because the components are so highly correlated. In other words, the remedy and the disease can be confused within the same treatment. Also, the dosage for different users can be the same, even if the individual scores are different, even diametrically opposed for each of the countries involved. This seems to increase monotonically with the number of items included in the index.

Some indexene producers simply add together the ingredients under the assumption that they are all of equal importance. Others weigh them according to some formula which may be intuitively convincing, but almost never explicitly justified. What is particularly alarming is that the ingredients may be simultaneously and systematically present but interact in unpredictable ways to produce radically different results. What is almost as damaging, however, is that indices may be labeled identically but generate very different scores for the same country. The contribution by Seva Gunitsky, “Lost in the Gray Zone: Competing Measures of Democracy in the Former Soviet Republics” on democracy indices applied to the former Soviet republics, is particularly illuminating in this regard. Her graphs in Chapter 5 and in Appendix 2 show astonishingly different scores at any moment in time and over time—presumably based on different definitions of the disease, rather than different clinical observations. The Transparency Perception Index (TPI) is often cited as one of the most successful when measured in terms of media citation or references by policymakers. Yet it relies on the Delphi Method of extracting opinions from—of all people—foreign businessmen, when it is the hoi polloi who are not likely to be known by these respondents and who are most likely to be affected by corruption in any given country.

Indexitis is a disease plaguing the recent flood of compound indicators of state performance and should be avoided. The core of the problem lies with the complexity of institutions and the policies they pursue, coupled with the recognition by virtually all social scientists that this has increased exponentially in recent decades. This already difficult analytical challenge has been made worse by the seemingly unlimited demand by existing policymakers and aspiring policy influencers for simple ratings or rankings that they believe will help them make more enlightened policies or attract the attention of relevant publics. Social scientists are almost equally guilty since they are often under peer pressure to appear scientific and believe that this requires them to convert difficult and multidimensional qualities into simple, aggregative quantities and, of course, to manipulate them statistically.

Recognizing the effectiveness of blaming and shaming specific countries—especially when these are places whose behavior the index maker does not approve of—is not the same thing as pretending that such data are scientifically valid and, hence, capable of providing a useful compound indicator of such complex phenomena as democracy, sovereignty, human rights, regime transformation, stateness, rule of law, quality of life e così via.

Institutional or policy complexity is not an additive. It is rooted in the interaction of multiple components and subject to the contingencies imposed by the environments in which they are embedded. Even when (not often the case) the components chosen, standard scored, weighted, and combined to form an index are informed by a plausible theory, this does not capture either the interaction effects or the environmental contingencies. Many of these indices are composed by simply summing their variables—as many as 24! This seems to be the case of the Globalization Index of the Economic Intelligence Unit—although the items are weighted according to an explicit formula that, however, is not justified theoretically, nor is the inclusion of specific items. It is entirely possible that two or more units could receive the same aggregate score while differing (even being diametrically opposed) on every item. Inversely, it is usually possible to produce more empirically reliable indicators, as judged by intercoder agreement, by measuring the same thing several times or by convoluting cause and effect.

The obvious solution for scholars is not to stop inventing new indicators and gathering additional data, but to stop thoughtlessly aggregating these data into a single index. (For an example for a good indicator, see Svend-Erik Skaaning, Johan Gerring, and Henrikas Bartusvicius, “A Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy,” Comparative Political Studies 48 [no. 12, 2015]: 1491–1525.) Granted that consumer appeal and public impact would suffer, but this could open the door to the systematic analysis of how the component items relate to each other and respond to different contextual conditions.

Indexitis can be cured. But it will not be easy, since the prestige of so many social scientists and the clout of so many policy advocates are at stake. What is needed is not some massive antidote and certainly not an enema to purge it altogether. What is needed is a radical separation between two different cures: Indexene₁ and Indexene₂. The former would be designed intuitively by activists in think tanks, government agencies, and nongovernmental organizations and compiled for maximum public impact. The latter would be designed by scholars according to a careful examination of its internal ingredients and their interrelationships for the purpose of scientific inquiry. Indexitis emerges when the two are confounded—when advocates pretend that their Indexene ₁ scores and rankings are conceptually valid and empirically accurate and when the Indexene ₂ of scholars fails to reflect theoretical priorities and/or to respect internal consistency. The result of such a separation could a more healthy future for all concerned.