Institutional Quality, State Intervention, and Democratic Accountability in Europe
Short description
This project addresses central theoretical and empirical challenges facing Europe today. The starting point is that the quality of institutions, which is understood as fair and impartial application of laws and policies with low levels of corruption, and variation of such is critical for understanding today’s politics and poliy.
The project will be carried out during a 10 month sabbatical year at Harvard University’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European studies, starting on 1 September, 2021.
The project builds on 12-plus years of Charron´s previous scholarly work, and is broadly understood in three parts. First, he will study consequences of varying ‘quality of government’ (QoG) on European citizens’ policy preferences, namely, how perceptions of corruption affect public demand for state intervention such as re-distributive policies like taxation, regulation, and inter-EU redistribution in the form of aid to members states in need post-COVID-19, along with preferences for authoritarian ‘strong-man’ polices. Second, he is interested in European voters’ electoral responses to political corruption, and why some politicians are held accountable (or not), along with the effect of gender equality on corruption e.g. causes of corruption. Third, is the organization and analysis of newly collected primary data in 2020-2021 to investigate these themes: an EU-financed survey of over 120,000 respondents in 27 EU countries from the 4th round of the ‘European Quality of Government Index’, new time-series data on thousands of European local-level municipalities, and an election-poll survey during the Romanian municipal elections in September 2020.