This paper explores the importance of sub-national vis-à-vis national differences in good governance, control of corruption or what in the literature is known as quality of government (QoG). Methodologically the paper uses both a large-N quantitative analysis and qualitative case studies to...

This paper argues that government quality – operationalized as the ability of government to treat all their citizens in an impartial way – levels the ‘playing field' for economic agents with and without connections to politicians and administrators in government, therefore encouraging...

In the theoretical literature on government design, few variables have received more attention than the size of the polity. Since Plato’s famous prediction that the optimal size of a political unit should be 5040 free citizens, the list of thinkers concerned about state size would include...

Why do officials in some countries favor entrenched contractors while others assign public contracts more impartially? According to the research, such variation responds to differences in political institutions, economic development and historical preconditions. This paper instead emphasizes the...

In 1936, while Sweden gave birth to one of the most peaceful solutions to class conflict (i.e. the Neo-Corporatist Welfare State) with the iconic signature of the Saltsjöbaden Accord, Spain gave birth to the most violent results: the Spanish Civil War. Why did the political, social and economic...

Local governments are no longer restricted to in-house production of public services. Contracting out and intermunicipal cooperation have proven to be two viable alternatives, and have gained widespread recognition in practice as well as in scholarly literature. In this paper, we first analyze...

This paper presents the latest version of the European Quality of Government Index (‘EQI'). The data builds on previously published data from 2010 (Charron, Lapuente and Rothstein 2013; Charron, Dijkstra and Lapuente 2013). Based on the largest regionally-focused survey to date, collected in the...

One aim of the QoG Institute is to make publicly available cross-national comparative data on QoG and its correlates. To accomplish this objective we have compiled both a cross-sectional dataset with global coverage pertaining to the year 2002 (or the closest year available), and a...

One aim of the QoG Institute is to make publicly available cross-national comparative data on QoG and its correlates. To accomplish this objective we have compiled both a cross-sectional dataset with global coverage pertaining to the year 2002 (or the closest year available), and a...