Quality of Government: Exploring a Shift in Knowledge Production from International Organisations to Academia

In the last decades, there has been an increased interest in measuring quality of government, good governance, and similar concepts related to the quality of state institutions. Public, private and non-governmental actors are interested in indicators and indexes of government quality both as research and policy tools. Virtually all major measures of quality of government are produced by international organisations, which have played a crucial part in defining the concept itself. However, the conceptual framework upon which these measures are based has been subject to substantial criticism by social scientists. The main problem is that these measures are not anchored to any scientific theory, but are rather an outcome of a data-driven conceptualisation. Moreover, it is evident that the international organisations that produce measures of government quality are proponents of certain neoliberal values, which are reflected in these measures. In order to address these problems, social scientists have recently started the debate on building a theoretically justified framework for the concept of quality of government. Thus, the production of knowledge on the quality of state institutions has started to shift from international organisations to academic circles, at least up to a certain extent. The objective of the study at hand is to examine this ongoing knowledge contest, and to analyse the (in)existing linkages between these new academic proposals and existing measures of quality of government.