While governance indicators abound, the meaning of good governance seems to become more diffuse. La Porta et al. (1999:223) define ‘good government’ as “good-for-economic-development”, but concede that one could also adopt a broader view and take into account “lower inequality, greater diversity among people, or maintained traditions”. Grindle (1997:5) takes ‘good governments’ to signify those that are “able to design and implement appropriate public policies, administer resources equitably, transparently, and efficiently, and respond efficaciously to the social welfare and economic claims of citizens”. Helliwell and Huang (2006:1) give a somewhat similar account, when they state that “the quality of a government depends on the extent to which it improves the welfare of its citizens”.
Although most governance indicator schemes provide rough conceptual schemes to organise the indicator sets, we contend that the fundamental public values of what societies expect from the public sector, remain underexposed. This paper wants to uncover this value structure of governance rankings.
We use the framework of Christopher Hood to identify three public values; a government that is productive, with due processes and within a solid regime. Next, we perform a factor analyses on a selection of variables from two existing datasets, the Quality of Government Institute 2011 cross-section (QoG) dataset and the Institutional Profiles Database 2009 (IPD) dataset. In order to keep enough countries in our analysis without estimating missing values, we needed to remove several variables that greatly lowered the listwise valid N-count. Doing this, we ended up including 33 perception-based governance-related variables in the analysis. Initial analyses seem to indicate that the production values and process values are identifiable factors behind governance indicators. Regime values however do not stand out as a separate factor.
