Victor Lapuente

Regional Governance Matters: Quality of Government within European Union Member States

Charron N., Dijkstra L. and Lapuente V. Regional governance matters: quality of government within European Union member states, Regional Studies. This study presents novel data (European QoG Index – EQI) on the ‘quality of government’ (QoG) – understood as low corruption, impartial public services and rule of law – for national and sub-national levels in twenty-seven European Union countries. The EQI shows notable within-country variations: while high-performing regions in Italy and Spain (for example, Bolzano, País Vasco) rank amongst the best European Union regions, others perform well below the European Union average. The index is highly correlated with sub-national levels of socio-economic development and levels of social trust, yet political decentralization is uncorrelated with greater within-country, or higher levels of overall, QoG.

The Merit of Meritocratization: Politics, Bureaucracy, and the Institutional Deterrents of Corruption

Comparative studies of corruption focus on the selection and incentives of policymakers. With few exceptions, actors who are in charge of implementing policies have been neglected. This article analyzes an original data set on the bureaucratic features and its effects on corruption in fifty-two countries. Two empirical findings challenge the conventional wisdom in literature. First, certain bureaucratic factors, particularly meritocratic recruitment, reduce corruption, even when controlling for a large set of alternative explanations. Second, the analysis shows that other allegedly relevant bureaucratic factors, such as public employees’ competitive salaries, career stability, or internal promotion, do not have a significant impact.

Why Do Some Regions in Europe Have a Higher Quality of Government

While most of the quantitative literature on quality of government has focused on national differences, subnational variation has been neglected, mainly due to the lack of data. This study explores subnational divergences in quality of government (understood as control of corruption, impartial treatment of citizens, and government effectiveness) using newly created subnational data including over 70 European regions. It addresses the institutional puzzle of why regions which share so many formal institutions (e.g., Northern and Southern Italy) do diverge so much in quality of government. Similar to recent political economy scholarship, our theory points to historical path dependencies. The study argues that a major factor explaining regional path dependencies is the consolidation of clientelistic networks in those regions where rulers have historically (seventeenth to nineteenth centuries) less constraints to their decisions.

Quality of Government and Corruption from a European Perspective

Contents: Introduction PART I: DEFINING QoG AND WHY IT MATTERS TO EUROPE 1. A Focus on the European Union and the Sub-National Dimension of QoG Lewis Dykstra 2. Conceptualizing Quality of Government Bo Rothstein PART II: QUANTITATIVE ASSESSMENT OF QoG IN THE EU 3. Evaluating EU Countries by QoG: National Level Nicholas Charron 4. QoG at the Sub-National Level and the EQI Nicholas Charron PART III: CASE STUDIES AND LESSONS FROM THE REGIONAL QUALITATIVE EXPERT INTERVIEWS 5. Variation in Sub-National Quality of Government in Italy and a Closer Look at QoG in Bolzano and Campania Nicholas Charron 6. Variation in Sub-National Quality of Government in Belgium: Flanders and Wallonia Jonas Hakansson 7. Variation in Sub-National Quality of Government in Romania Oana Borcan 8. Conclusions: How to Improve QoG in Europe Victor Lapuente

Civil War Spain Versus Swedish Harmony: The Quality of Government Factor

In 1936, while Sweden gave birth to one of the most peaceful solutions to class conflict (i.e., the neo-corporatist welfare state), Spain gave birth to one of the most violent outcomes of class conflict: the Spanish Civil War. Why did the political and socio-economic elites choose collaboration in Sweden and violent confrontation in Spain? This article underlines an overlooked intervening factor: the organization of the bureaucracy. In the late 19th century, semi-authoritarian Sweden created a meritocratic autonomous bureaucracy. In contrast, Spain—where executive and administrative positions were frequently accountable to parliamentary dynamics—built a patronage-based administration. The result was that the ruling Swedish Left could not offer public offices to core supporters and had to restrict its policies to satisfy the (more collaborationist) demands of its “policy-seekers,” while the ruling Spanish Left, thanks to the ample margin of maneuver it enjoyed to appoint and promote state officials, could satisfy the (more confrontational) demands of its “office-seekers.”

Careers, Connections, and Corruption Risks: Investigating the Impact of Bureaucratic Meritocracy on Public Procurement Processes

Why do officials in some countries favor entrenched contractors, while others assign public contracts more impartially? This article emphasizes the important interplay between politics and bureaucracy. It suggests that corruption risks are lower when bureaucrats’ careers do not depend on political connections but on their peers. We test this hypothesis with a novel measure of career incentives in the public sector—using a survey of more than 18,000 public sector employees in 212 European regions—and a new objective corruption risk measure including over 1.4 million procurement contracts. Both show a remarkable subnational variation across Europe. The study finds that corruption risks are indeed significantly lower where bureaucrats’ career incentives exclusively follow professional criteria. In substantial terms, moving EU regions so that bureaucrats’ merit and effort would matter as much as in, for example, Baden-Wüttemberg (90th percentile) could lead to a 13–20 billion Euro savings per year.

Meritocratic administration and democratic stability

This paper presents a hypothesis for understanding democratic stability based on the distinction between politicized and meritocratic bureaucracies. We argue that in a politicized administration, the professional careers of large numbers of government officials depend directly upon which party wins the elections. This increases the likelihood that the government will take opportunistic actions aimed at surviving in office at any cost; that is, benefiting core supporters at the expense of other groups. In turn, this may foster pre-emptive actions from the opposition, such as military coups. Conversely, in democracies with meritocratic administrations, incumbents are credibly constrained from undertaking partial policies because their hands are tied in terms of managing the staff policy of the state apparatus. Consequently, countries with meritocratic bureaucracies have greater prospects for democratic stability. Empirically, we illustrate the mechanisms with two well-documented cases of democratic transitions that enshrined a politicized administration – Spain (1876–1936) and Venezuela (1958–1998) – and one transition that kept a meritocratic bureaucracy, Spain (1975–).

Corruption and use of antibiotics in regions of Europe

The aim of this article is to investigate the association between corruption and antibiotic use at sub-national level. We explore the correlation between, on the one hand, two measures of corruption (prevalence of corruption in the health sector and prevalence of bribes in the society) at regional level from the European Quality of Government Index; and, on the other, the consumption of antibiotics in those European regions from a 2009 Special Euro Barometer. In a multivariate regression model, we control for potential confounders: purchasing power of standardized regional gross domestic product, inhabitants per medical doctor and age-standardized all-cause mortality rates. We find that there is a strong positive association between both measures of corruption (i.e. in the health sector, and in the society at large) and antibiotics use; and that this association is robust to the introduction of the control variables. These results support previous findings in the literature linking corruption to higher antibiotic use at cross-national level. We show that corruption does seem to account for some of the remarkable between-region variation in antibiotic consumption in Europe.

The wealth of regions: quality of government and SMEs in 172 European regions

With this paper we put forward a novel theoretical argument that the individual’s subjective evaluations of the quality of government (QoG) in terms of its impartiality influences his or her complex assessments of the opportunity and feasibility of a business venture, and calculations on expected long-term utility from business venturing. This in turn affects his or her decision to engage in legal business venturing or not. We hypothesize that high QoG is linked with higher rates of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in a polity and a more even pattern of their territorial dispersion. Using original survey data on QoG from 172 regions in eighteen European Union countries, we find that regions where governments are perceived by their citizens as impartial and free from corruption have on average significantly more SMEs. We also find that in less corrupt countries the spatial distribution of SMEs is more even than in more corrupt countries.

The Wealth of Regions: Government Quality and Entrepreneurship in Europe

This paper argues that government quality – operationalized as the ability of government to treat all their citizens in an impartial way – levels the ‘playing field’ for economic agents with and without connections to politicians and administrators in government, therefore encouraging entrepreneurial minded individuals to start or develop their business. Based on a unique data set on the quality of government in 172 regions of 18 European countries, the paper shows that regions with more impartial governments have significantly more small and medium-sized firms. It is also shown that quality of government is a determinant of the spatial distribution of entrepreneurship within countries. Under partial governments entrepreneurs face incentives to create and maintain special relations with power holders and therefore to be closer to the source of privileges and locate their activities around the national capitals, where the most relevant political connections rest.