Mapping Quality of Government in the European Union: A Study of National and Sub-National Variation

Abstract

This study maps-out the variation in quality of government (‘QoG’ - e.g. low levels or corruption, protection of the rule of law, government effectiveness and accountability) for the national and regional level in the 27 EU countries. We begin with a national level assessment of QoG in the EU, elucidating the three significantly different cluster groupings of states that emerge using existing data from the World Bank. We then present a novel sub-national-level data for 172 EU regions based on a survey of 34,000 residents across 18 countries, which constitutes the largest multi-country survey on QoG at the regional level to date. We combine the two measures to conduct a large multilevel assessment of QoG in Europe. The paper shows, first, that there are notable differences in the level of quality of government across EU regions; second, that those differences, despite being inherently difficult to capture, can be measured with sufficient accuracy and are resistant to the most stringent robustness checks available; third, that those differences in quality of government are highly correlated with the available indicators of differences in socio-economic development of EU regions.