Measuring quality of government in EU regions across space and time

Abstract

A wave of recent cross‐national research has pointed to the positive consequences for countries with high levels of “quality of government” (QoG), broadly defined, such as corruption, impartiality, and quality of public services. Yet the question of how QoG varies at the sub‐national level is still widely overlooked, in particular with measures that are available over time. To address it, we present the third round of data from the regional European Quality of Government Index (EQI) survey corruption (D73), Europe (N44) governance (H11); sub‐national (R50), time series (C22), collected in 2017 and built upon the opinions of 78,000 respondents in 193 regions from 21 European countries. The data provides several contributions to the literature. First, while the majority of QoG‐type indices rely on expert assessments, the EQI relies on the assessments of citizens, who are the on‐the‐ground consumers of public services. Second, the data begins to show trends on QoG variation over time, as well as across European regions. Consequently, this data is the most comprehensive sub‐national data to date; mapping of QoG within and across EU countries over the past decade. Building on previous rounds of data collected in 2010 and 2013, the 2017 EQI, which is published free for scholarly use, builds on both perceptions and experiences of citizens in public service areas such as health care, education, and law enforcement. This paper presents the results of the latest survey, improved with respect to the previous ones, discussion of trends across space and over time, as well as interesting avenues for future research that we detect across European regions.

What is the Influence of News Media on People’s Perception of Corruption? Parametric and Non-Parametric Approaches

“…This study investigated the extent to which various sources of media have systematic effects on corruption perceptions in 21 European democracies. Using newly collected data from the European Quality of Government survey (Charron et al 2019) and both parametric and non-parametric estimation, the results show that citizens who mainly obtain their news information from social media have higher perceptions of corruption than citizens who obtain news from more traditional sources, such as newspapers, radio and TV. While other factors are also important determinants of the variability in corruption perception, we find that there is an independent effect of social media.…”

“…This study relies on newly collected data from the third round of the Quality of Government Institute's 'European Quality of Government Index' (EQI) survey (Charron et al 2019). The survey's primary aim is to build regional indices of quality of government and facilitate multi-level research on governance in EU countries (Charron et al 2015).…”

“…First, on neither of these 2 questions (1) how media influences the overall assessment of government by citizens, and (2) the extent to which certain media sources polarize citizens' attitudes have previous studies analyzed perceptions of corruption of political institutions. We do so by creating a composite index of a battery of questions concerning perceptions of corruption on the latest European Quality of Government Index survey, fielded in 2017 (Charron et al 2019). We explore the link between media consumption sources and perceptions of corruption in a comparative setting with nearly 78,000 respondents in 21 European democracies.…”

Do Citizens Support Cohesion Policy? Measuring European support for redistribution within the EU and its correlates

“…We ask respondents the extent to which the respondents perceive corruption in their own national and regional governing institutions as well as those of the European Union. As institutional and administrative quality is now a key goal of EU Cohesion policy (Charron et al, 2019), this topic has clear policy relevance. A full list of the survey's questions and formulations can be found in the appendix.…”

Are women more likely to throw the rascals out? The mobilizing effect of social service spending on female voters

“…To test the hypotheses elucidated in the previous section, we employ a comparative, observational design with data from the latest round of the European Quality of Government Index (EQI) survey (Charron et al 2019). The survey includes approximately 77,000 individuals from 21 EU Member States and was fielded during the summer of 2017.…”