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Ranking Countries for Good Governance Using Public Opinion Surveys

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Abstract

A large majority of the well-known governance indicators are based on the opinions of external experts. However, they do not fully capture how citizens perceive the governance environment and outcomes in their countries. This chapter discusses the advantages of a uniform and consistent framework for measuring governance quality across countries and over time based on evaluations by citizens, and the related challenges. We implement this framework in practice using data from the World Values Survey and provide a worldwide ranking of countries based on how citizens perceive the governance quality in their own countries. We further discuss how to correct the resulting citizen-centric governance indicators (CGI) for biases that could potentially be present in public opinion surveys, and the possible use of these indicators in policy-making.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Länder in German—second-tier jurisdictions in the country.

  2. 2.

    The exact formulation differs from wave to wave.

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Ivanyna, M., Shah, A. (2018). Ranking Countries for Good Governance Using Public Opinion Surveys. In: Malito, D., Umbach, G., Bhuta, N. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Indicators in Global Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62707-6_18

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