CROSS-COUNTRY COMPARISONS OF THE PERFORMANCE OF LAW ENFORCEMENT SYSTEMS IN A SOCIO-ECONOMIC CONTEXT: ANALYSIS OF DYNAMICS USING THE DEA METHOD
Currently, in the post-Soviet countries, the topic of reforming the police, courts, and prisons (criminal justice system, CJS) is widely discussed at the public talk level. To reform and to improve them at the state level, the cross-country comparison of their performance, based on international experience, is meaningful. It helps to assess reforms’ actual necessity, possible directions, and “role-model” numbers. Is it possible to assess the performance comprehensively, not ignoring the socio-economic context, dynamically at the national level, using the open data? The answer, taking into account the methodological and substantive limitations (lack of data, missing values, changing the methodology of analyzed indices, various perceptions of a proper CJS performance), seems to be the calculation of an integral indicator of the CJS performance, which allows, in the context of the socio-economic situation in the country, to look at its change over time and to relate it with the maximum possible number of other countries without cutting the option of further statistical analysis complication. The calculated DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) model allows us to analyze the aforementioned problem. It includes 8 variables on CJS functioning, its subjective perception, loading, and resources for 31 countries in 2004, 2008, and 2014. Four main trends of changes in the performance of countries over time were identified. The main possible reasons for the dynamics obtained for 9 countries, the most prominent representatives of the identified trends, are considered. The resulting index is in itself more informative than the existing assessments of the CJS, and can also be easily used in further statistical modeling, in particular, clustering, SEM-modeling, etc.