What Is Governance?

High-quality government

It has four approaches:

(1) procedural measures, such as the Weberian criteria of bureaucratic modernity;
(2) capacity measures, which include both resources and degree of professionalization
(3) output measures
(4) measures of bureaucratic autonomy.

Introduction

To measure governance, includes an elaboration of the issue's complexity and the confused state of current discussions.

In other words, everyone is interested in studying political institutions that limit or check power—democratic accountability and rule of law— but very few people pay attention to the institution that accumulates and uses power, the state.

The relative emphasis on checking institutions rather than power-deploying institutions is evident in the governance measures that have been developed in recent years.

The Varieties of Democracy project is also collecting data on bureaucratic quality based on expert surveys.

Other bureaucratic quality measures include the Bertelsmann Transformation Index which “focuses on how effectively policymakers facilitate and steer development and transformation processes,” and the proprietary Political Risk Service’s Group (PRSG) International Country Risk Guide

The existing measures of state quality or capacity have a number of limitations. There is an inherent weakness in expert surveys, especially when trying to create time-series data. Since the concept of good governance is not well established, different experts may intend different things when responding to the same survey question.

For example, there is an important difference between clientelism and outright corruption; in the former there is true reciprocity between patron and client, whereas in the latter there is no obligation on the part of the corrupt official to give anything back.

Rothstein argues that