Regional Governance Matters: Quality of Government within European Union Member States

Abstract

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

The Impact of Institutional Quality and Efficient Cohesion Investments on Economic Growth Evidence from Italian Regions

“…These include the World Governance Indicator [61], the Institutional Quality Index [14], and the European Quality of Government Index [62,63].…”

Identifying Clusters of Regions in the European South, based on their Economic, Social and Environmental Characteristics

“…In the first case, a fourth factor expressing the Quality of Government has been added to the Economic Indicator, thus making it a function of four sub-indicators. In the second case, the environmental factor has been removed from the Social Indicator, thus making it a function of three sub-indicators (Charron et al 2014(Charron et al , 2015. Finally, in the third case, the Accessibility Sub-indicator has been relaxed by taking into account only the distance of the regions from the main influence centers and not their geographical discontinuity.…”

Measuring Meritocracy in the Public Sector in Europe: a New National and Sub-National Indicator

“…We find that when we aggregate the measures to the national level, they correlate strikingly highly with alternative, expert-based survey data, along with measures of economic and social development, which lends credibility to the sub-national indicator. The measure at the subnational level correlates highly with past measures of petty corruption (percentage of reported bribery), the European Quality of Government Index (EQI) (Charron, Dijkstra and Lapuente 2014) and several similar indices of social and economic development and social trust. Thus, despite capturing this concept from a different direction, previous measures based on formal/expert assessments are in strong agreement with our informal/citizen experience-based measure.…”

“…Data availability at the subnational level is not as good as the national level, but we start with comparing the meritocracy measure with our index of regional-level quality of government from the EQI (Charron, Dijkstra and Lapuente 2014;. The data are available in two rounds, 2010 and 2013 (the latter is based on the same survey as the meritocracy measure).…”