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Abstract
Assessing Governance in 16 Countries: The Aggregate Picture,
World Governance Survey Discussion Paper 3
This paper reports on the aggregate findings of the pilot
World Governance Assessment project. It is divided into two
major sections. The first presents an aggregate profile of
governance performance in each of the 16 countries included
in this study. To facilitate the analysis, it groups the countries
in terms of high, medium and low governance score based on
the 2000 survey. It also discusses changes that have taken
place over the five-year period respondents were asked to
consider. Attention is paid to explaining the major changes
that have taken place, whether positive or negative, in individual
countries. The second section discusses governance ratings
by arena with a view to identifying, which seems to be particularly
volatile.
We emphasize the differences between the study of governance
and studies democratization in two important respects: (1)
governance provides a ‘thick’ definition that allows
for an assessment of a broader set of variables than those
typically included in studies of democratization; and (2)
it is not a priori loaded in the direction of favoring the
liberal-democratic model. As expected, our findings do not
automatically correlate well with studies that draw on this
model for its primary indicators. At the same time, we are
interested in determining how much overlap there is in the
explanatory variables used here with other attempts at measuring
governance (or specific aspects thereof).
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