This document presents the fifth round of the EQI data on regional governance in EU countries in the context of the previous four rounds (Charron, Dijkstra, and Lapuente, 2014; Charron, Dijkstra, and Lapuente, 2015; Charron, Lapuente, and Rothstein, 2013; Charron, Lapuente, and Annoni, 2019; Charron, Lapuente,...

In den vergangenen Jahren haben Bund, Länder und Kommunen ihren Personalbestand deutlich ausgeweitet. Dennoch wird vielerorts über einen Mangel an Personal geklagt, unter anderem weil zunehmende Regulierung zu Belastungen für das öffentliche Personal führt. Aufgrund des einsetzenden...

In the last five years, the European Union managed to find its way through a series of major shocks, including the pandemic and the 2022 surge in energy prices. The response was in many ways remarkable, including unprecedented EU borrowing to fund the NextGenerationEU economic recovery programme...

We computationally reproduce the central findings in Mehmood (2022), which studied the effect of a 2010 reform in Pakistan replacing the presidential appointment of high-court judges with peer appointments. Mehmood leveraged judicial records interpreted and coded by lawyers in Pakistan at the...

In recent years, there has been an increasing amount of research analyzing open government initiatives that enable access to the information held by public bodies, promoting accountability and the fight against corruption. As there are few studies on intermediate governments to date, this...

Under what conditions do governments become committed to and capable of delivering development? How can these processes be conceptualized and researched? And what (if anything) can be done to ‘get the politics right’ for development? This book draws on a major comparative research effort to...

This paper contributes to the literature on the nexus between decentralization and citizen trust in government through the use of a comprehensive set of decentralization measures that have been recently developed. Using measures of autonomy at both the regional and local (municipal) levels of...

Using both the onset of the US-China trade war in 2018 and the most recent Russia-Ukraine conflict and associated trade tensions, we show that government-linked firms increase their importing activity by roughly 33% (t=4.01) following the shock, while non-government linked firms trading to the...

The aim of the study is to examine the effect of government expenditures on institutional and economic dimensions of governance from the standpoint of selected indicators. We evaluate the effect of government expenditures on selected governance indicators (government effectiveness, regulatory...

This study aimed to analyse the impact of digitalisation on good governance with respect to selected local public administrations during the COVID-19 lockdown in the spring of 2020. The overriding assumption made is that agile values mediate the relationship between digitalisation and good...

A salient trend in crisis intervention has emerged in recent decades: Government and central banks offered funding directly to nonfinancial firms, bypassing banks and other credit intermediaries. We analyze the long-term consequences of such policies by focusing on firm quality dynamics. In a...

This chapter examines why democracies in the developing world frequently underperform in providing effective governance. We argue that these shortcomings stem from weaknesses in accountability mechanisms, which leave governments vulnerable to corruption, clientelism, and elite capture. Our...

This chapter reviews the origins, evolution, and modern forms of government, and proposes a research agenda. It contends that rather than being a homogeneous form of patrimonialism, early government was diverse and, at times, fostered order and prosperity. Its subsequent development did not...

Beyond its immediate impact on public health and the economy, the COVID-19 pandemic has put democracy under stress. While a common view is that people should blame the government rather than the political system for bad crisis management, an opposing view is that dissatisfaction with government...

This chapter uses happiness data to assess the quality of government. Our happiness data are drawn from the Gallup World Poll, starting in 2005 and extending to 2017 or 2018. In our analysis of the panel of more than 150 countries and generally over 1,500 national-level observations, we show...

Wirtschaftspolitik in einer sozialen Marktwirtschaft möchte Wohlstand schaffen und verteilen. Dies zeigt sich in den Wahl- und Regierungsprogrammen auf Bundesebene seit 2002, allerdings mit sehr unterschiedlichen Akzenten. Zur Analyse wird deshalb die relative Häufigkeit der Begriffe...

This paper studies how divided government - arising when control of the government branches is split between parties - affects the polarization of the legislature and policy implementation. Using data on electoral and legislative outcomes for US states and a regression-discontinuity design, we...