Quality of Government (QoG)
Provides some of the largest and most comprehensive datasets on governance.
| Host | University of Gothenburg |
|---|---|
| Website | QoG |
| Key Theme | Governance |
Quality of Government (QoG)
The Quality of Government (QoG) Institute is an independent research institute within the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg. QoG is comprised of about 30 researchers who conduct and promote research on the causes, consequences and nature of Good Governance and the Quality of Government (QoG) - that is, trustworthy, reliable, impartial, uncorrupted and competent government institutions.
QoG’s award-winning datasets focus on concepts related to quality of government, transparency, and public administration. The main objective of QoG’s research is to address the theoretical and empirical problem of how political institutions of high quality can be created and maintained. A second objective is to study the effects of Quality of Government on a number of policy areas, such as health, the environment, social policy, and poverty.
QoG in Demscore
The Data
The Demscore infrastructure includes a total of 17 datasets from QoG, covering a time span from 1530 to 2021 (for Sweden) and 1946 to 2023 worldwide.
The QoG institute offers some of the largest and most comprehensive datasets in terms of thematic breadth and range of sources in the social sciences. The data are all publicly available in four distinct datasets compiled from over one hundred public data sources. The latter datasets are part of QoG’s core operations:
- the Standard dataset, with some 1,900 variables;
- the OECD dataset with more fine-grained data but only for OECD member countries. These are available either as cross-sectional or time-series with data from 1946 to present and cover 19 thematic areas.
- the EU Regional dataset, consisting of approximately 450 variables from mainly Eurostat, covering larger European regions at the so-called NUTS-level.
The QoG datasets are unique in that they:
- Combine data from multiple sources;
- are harmonized in terms of country/year classifications and cleaned from missing codes and errors;
- include a wide variety of variables of relevance for interdisciplinary research;
- are accompanied by comprehensive codebooks with detailed information on sources, as well as descriptive statistics of all variables;
- are publicly available for download;
- offer active user support for online tools and data requests.
The QoG Basic Datasets which contains the most frequently used variables of the Standard Dataset, is currently not included in Demscore as all variables from that dataset are included through the QoG Standard Time Series Dataset.
In addition to the compilation datasets, QoG offers a number of original datasets created by QoG researchers. These datasets focus on concepts related to quality of government, transparency and public administration. The original datasets include:
- The QoG Expert Survey is a dataset based on our survey of experts on public administration around the world, available in an individual dataset and an aggregated dataset covering more than 100 countries.
- The European Quality of Government Index. (EQI) The EQI data contains information on sub-national governance in Europe from three rounds of a large, pan-European survey on citizen perceptions and experiences with public services. Both micro and sub-national data are provided.
- The Swedish Agency database which consists of a comprehensive sample of administrative agencies in the Swedish executive bureaucracy between 1960 and 2014.
We also include the Policies, Instructions and Services in Swedish Municipalities Database in Demscore.
Data preparation in the Demscore infrastructure
The following section provides an overview of the data sources provided by QoG data and how they are prepared and included in Demscore.
Variables from QoG dataset in Demscore are available in their original form in the datasets’ respective Output Units. The illustration shows all 14 Output Units identified for QoG and which datasets belong to each.
All QoG variables can be retrieved through all other Output Units within QoG. The overview shows which variables can be retrieved in which other Output Units within this Module. The labelled arrows further indicate which aggregation methods we use and in what way observations are translated to each other.
Main Contact
You can find a detailed explanation of all Units and more information on their programmatic construction on the Documentation page and in the Demscore Methodology Document.