How's Your Government? International Evidence Linking Good Government and Well-Being

Abstract

In this paper we employ World Values Survey measures of life satisfaction as though they were direct measures of utility, and use them to evaluate alternative features and forms of government in large international samples. We find that life satisfaction is more closely linked to several World Bank measures of the quality of government than to real per capita incomes, in simple correlations and more fully specified models explaining international differences in life satisfaction. We test for differences in the relative importance of different aspects of good government, and find a hierarchy of preferences that depends on the level of development. The ability of governments to provide a trustworthy environment, and to deliver services honestly and efficiently, appears to be of paramount importance for countries with worse governance and lower incomes. The balance changes once acceptable levels of efficiency, trust and incomes are achieved, when more value is attached to building and maintaining the institutions of electoral democracy.

Well‐Being, Social Capital and Public Policy: What's New?

“…The second group ( GOVDEM ) relates more to the operation of the democratic process, capturing aspects of voice and accountability, and of political stability. Tests reported in Helliwell and Huang (2005 b ) show that GOVDO matters more to the poorer countries, while GOVDEM matters more among the richer countries.…”

Viewpoint: Measuring and understanding subjective well‐being

“…But the life evaluations provide a much broader and more complete assessment of the quality of life. Since the additional variance is explained by the same variables that explain differences among individuals within the same country, along with other measures of the quality of the national social and institutional fabric (Helliwell and Huang 2008), there is scope for explaining international differences in well‐being in terms of average values of income and other variables measured at the individual or household level.…”

Measuring quality of government in EU regions across space and time

“…Scholars have pointed to a host of negative consequences for countries that demonstrate sufficiently low levels of quality of government (QoG) (Holmberg, Rothstein, & Nasiritousi, ; Mauro, ; Norris, ). The cross‐country empirical literature has found that states that suffer from high corruption, weak rule of law, and low impartiality are associated with, inter alia , lower levels of economic development (Mauro, ), poorer health (Holmberg & Rothstein, ), poorer environmental outcomes (Welsch, ), greater income inequality (Gupta, Davoodi, & Alonso‐Terme, ), lower levels of happiness (Veenhoven, ), and lower overall subjective well‐being (Helliwell & Huang, ).…”