Two dif­fer­ent stud­ies rank­ing African gov­er­nance from best to worst both have the coun­try of Mau­ri­tius as the best.

The New York Times arti­cle on the cor­rup­tion stud­ies focuses on a squab­ble that caused them to split into two. Har­vard polit­i­cal sci­en­tist, Robert Rot­berg, and Sudan phil­an­thropist, Mo Ibrahim, used to work together on the project, but dif­fer­ences over con­trol and the final say led to the split.

For our snip­pet, we go to an analy­sis of the rank­ings from the two sur­veys, and the results are very sim­i­lar. Writer Celia Dug­ger breaks down the data for us.

The two rival rat­ings count 9 out of 10 of the same coun­tries among the best and worst gov­erned, though not in the same order. Among the best gov­erned, both name Mau­ri­tius, Sey­chelles, Cape Verde, Botswana, Tunisia, Ghana, Namibia, South Africa and São Tomé and Príncipe. The Rot­berg index also includes Alge­ria in the top 10, while the Ibrahim index counts Lesotho.

Among the worst per­form­ers, both count Guinea, Zim­babwe, Eritrea, Cen­tral African Repub­lic, Ivory Coast, Congo, Chad, Sudan and Soma­lia. For the Rot­berg index, Angola made the bot­tom 10, while the Ibrahim index included Equa­to­r­ial Guinea.

They had more sub­stan­tive dif­fer­ences over rank­ings for nations in the mid­dle. For exam­ple, the Rot­berg index ranked Malawi, a small, impov­er­ished south­ern African nation, 14th, while the Ibrahim index put it 25th.

Daniel Kauf­mann, a Brook­ings Insti­tu­tion expert on cor­rup­tion who is advis­ing the Ibrahim Foun­da­tion, said the effort to make the index an African assess­ment of African gov­er­nance could add to its influ­ence on a con­ti­nent where there is still sus­pi­cion of West­ern research.

“It will be harder to reject because of the African­iza­tion,” said Mr. Kauf­mann, who was for­merly at the World Bank Insti­tute, where he shaped its global gov­er­nance ratings.

The Ibrahim Foun­da­tion has placed full-page adver­tise­ments in news­pa­pers in 45 African coun­tries describ­ing its find­ings in local lan­guages, an attempt to inform a broader pub­lic and to encour­age civic groups to take advan­tage of the trove of infor­ma­tion on its Web site.

Advis­ers on the Ibrahim index say it relies on more recent data — from 2008, as well as 2007 — and tracks a broader array of infor­ma­tion, includ­ing assess­ments by experts, than does the Rot­berg index.