| dc.description.abstract | While most of the quantitative literature on quality of government involving European
countries has focused on national differences, sub-national variation has been
neglected, mainly due to the lack of data. This paper explores sub-national
divergences in quality of government (understood as control of corruption, impartial
treatment of citizens and government effectiveness) in three major policy areas (law
enforcement, health and education) for more than 70 European regions. We address
the question of why regions which share so many formal institutions (e.g. Northern
and Southern Italy) do diverge so much in quality of government. We propose two
hypotheses to explain such variation. First, similar to recent political economy
literature, the paper underlines the importance of informal institutions historically
transmitted. Yet, unlike this scholarship, the paper argues that it is not different
cultural values (e.g. “generalized trust”) what explains regional path dependencies,
but the persistence of patrimonial clientelistic networks created in those regions with
historically unconstrained rulers. Second, we test the impact of contemporary
political institutions that represent the level to which governments regions share
power. The empirical analysis shows strong evidence for our first hypothesis; that
those regions that constrained executives’ attempts to build clientelistic networks
during the 17th-19th centuries exhibit significantly higher levels of quality of
government today, controlling for standard political, cultural and socio-economic
indicators. | sv |
