Brief Background This codebook provides information on the EQI survey data, which is intended to provide scholars and policy makers with metrics about citizens' perceptions and experiences with governance in Europe. The survey has been thus far done in two rounds-2010 and 2013. The data file here provides the combined microdata for both years. The EQI survey data was originally funded by the EU Commission (REGIO) and published in a report by Charron, Lapuente and Rothstein (2010) and later by Charron, Dijkstra and Lapuente (2014) in Regional Studies. In 2013, the survey was redone ; this time funded by the EU Commission via ANTICORRP, a large collaborative research group of scholars across Europe 1. The survey provides unique data for researchers and policy makers in that it is mainly concerned with governance of public sector institutions at the sub-national level. Questions are posed to respondents about perceived and experience with corruption, impartiality of services and quality of public services in several public service sectors. As opposed to many other survey in Europe that allow crosscountry or regional comparisons, the EQI Sample and Method The survey, part of a European-wide anti-corruption research project, was conducted in both rounds by Efficience 3 (E3), a French market-research, survey company specializing in public opinion throughout Europe for researchers, politicians and advertising firms. E3 conducted the interviews

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Why do officials in some countries favor entrenched contractors, while others assign public contracts more impartially? This article emphasizes the important interplay between politics and bureaucracy. It suggests that corruption risks are lower when bureaucrats' careers do not depend on political connections but on their peers. We test this hypothesis with a novel measure of career incentives in the public sector-using a survey of more than 18,000 public sector employees in 212 European regions-and a new objective corruption risk measure including over 1.4 million procurement contracts. Both show a remarkable subnational variation across Europe. The study finds that corruption risks are indeed significantly lower where bureaucrats' career incentives exclusively follow professional criteria. In substantial terms, moving EU regions so that bureaucrats' merit and effort would matter as much as in, for example, Baden-Wüttemberg (90th percentile) could lead to a 13-20 billion Euro savings per year.

This article analyses the effects of political regimes over state capacity or the quality of government (QoG): Do democratic states perform better than authoritarian ones? Previous studies point to a nonlinear relationship between democracy and government quality. It is argued here that QoG is a function of both forces of supply (leaders who have the power to make reforms) and demand (citizens' desire for mid‐ to long‐term investments over short‐term needs), the latter of which is a function of economic development. In democratic states, leaders have stronger incentives to improve QoG after a certain degree of wealth is reached, while in poorer countries they have little incentive for long‐term bureaucratic investments. Thus it is predicted that the relationship between democracy and QoG is conditional, based on economic development. With over 125 countries in the sample, this hypothesis is tested using time‐series panel data and spatial models, and strong empirical support is found.

While most of the quantitative literature on quality of government involving European countries has focused on national differences, sub-national variation has been neglected, mainly due to the lack of data. This paper explores sub-national divergences in quality of government (understood as control of corruption, impartial treatment of citizens and government effectiveness) in three major policy areas (law enforcement, health and education) for more than 70 European regions. We address the question of why regions which share so many formal institutions (e.g. Northern and Southern Italy) do diverge so much in quality of government. We propose two hypotheses to explain such variation. First, similar to recent political economy literature, the paper underlines the importance of informal institutions historically transmitted. Yet, unlike this scholarship, the paper argues that it is not different cultural values (e.g. "generalized trust") what explains regional path dependencies, but the persistence of patrimonial clientelistic networks created in those regions with historically unconstrained rulers. Second, we test the impact of contemporary political institutions that represent the level to which governments regions share power. The empirical analysis shows strong evidence for our first hypothesis; that those regions that constrained executives' attempts to build clientelistic networks during the 17 th -19 th centuries exhibit significantly higher levels of quality of government today, controlling for standard political, cultural and socio-economic indicators.