The Quality of Government Expert Survey 2020 (Wave III): Report

Abstract

The Quality of Government Expert Survey (QoG Expert Survey) is a research project aimed at documenting the organizational design of public bureaucracies and bureaucratic behavior in countries around the world. This report documents the design and implementation of the third wave of the QoG Expert Survey, and initial analysis of the new data. The QoG Expert Survey 2020 produced ten country-level indicators, pertaining to bureaucratic structure (meritocratic re- cruitment, security of tenure, closedness) and bureaucratic behavior (political interference into day-to-day bureaucratic decision-making and impartiality). The data is based on the assessments of more than 550 experts, carefully selected for their contextual subject-matter knowledge. The experts took part in the research pro bono. The main innovation of the third wave is the use of anchoring vignettes and Item-Response Theory (IRT)-based aggregation techniques to produce point estimates that account and adjust for systematic differences in expert subjective assess- ments and variation in expert reliability. The resulting indicators are internally coherent and also correlate well with other well-established measures for the same concepts. The strength of the association between the data from 2020 and the two previous waves of the survey suggests that the data is likely to measure the same underling phenomena, while offering enough variability over time to be used in time-series analysis.