The rule of law research agenda is still in its infancy – at least vis-à-vis the neighboring literature on democracy and democratization. This is reflected in the fact that no attempt has been made to investigate the empirical relationship between sub-components of the rule law. In this paper, we set out to make such an appraisal. Taking our queue from a recent attempt to get at this relationship using radial types, we show that the consequent diminished subtypes are virtually empty empirically. The predominant dynamics is instead that cases are characterized by either all of the attributes representing the sub-components or that they fall short in every regard. This indicates the existence of a certain kind of relationship characterized by what we refer to as virtuous and vicious circles. These findings can be taken to support, first, the creation of composite measures by aggregating across the rule of law subcomponents and, second, that the virtuous/vicious circles rather than the diminished subtypes merit explanatory attention.
