The Quality of Government Expert Survey 2008-2011: A Report

Abstract

The literature on the quality of government generally, and corruption more specifically, focus main-ly on the political side of the state. There are however strong reasons to believe that bureaucratic structures have important effects on political, economic, and social outcomes, but with very few exceptions there are no cross-country datasets. In order to meet this challenge, and provide data on the bureaucratic structure on a large number of countries in the developed and the developing parts of the world, this paper presents the Quality of Government Expert Survey. The survey covers a variety of topics relevant to the structure and functioning of the public administration, such as mer-itocratic recruitment, internal promotion and career stability, salaries, impartiality, NPM reforms, effectiveness/efficiency, and bureaucratic representation of, for example, ethnic groups and gender. This paper describe the data-collection, provide some basic facts about the data and about the experts, and, finally, analyze how experts have answered the items in the questionnaire in order to evaluate potential respondent perception bias.