Call for papers

The Quality of Government (QoG) Institute (established in 2004) turns 20. During these years, the QoG Institute has directed attention of scholars and policy-makers to issues such as impartiality in the exercise of public power, professionalism in public service delivery, effective measures against corruption, and meritocracy instead of patronage and nepotism.

We celebrate the anniversary of the QoG Institute with an international conference to take stock of the accumulated knowledge and to discuss the avenues for further research. We invite scholars interested in Quality of Government, understood in a broad sense, to take part in the conference. We welcome papers engaging with theoretical and empirical questions related to the quality of government and employing diverse methodological approaches. Among others, we are interested in the following topics:

• Philosophical foundations of quality of government and governance;
• Definitions and measurements of state and bureaucratic capacity;
• Cross-national and within-country variations in government capacity, quality, and effectiveness;
• Effects of different features of public institutions on broader outcomes such as socio-economic development, corruption prevention, policy implementation, regulatory quality and entrepreneurship, scientific productivity and innovation, economic activities or infrastructure efficiency, and environmental outcomes;
• Applications of QoG to non-Western countries: to what extent do concepts such as government capacity, quality of government, and bureaucratic impartiality, which have mostly been developed in a Western context, travel to other world regions?

Please apply by sending a paper proposal (c. 500 words) to alice.johansson@gu.se, with cc to victor.lapuente@pol.gu.se, no later than October 16^th, 2023.

The organization covers travel and accommodation costs, except for the flight tickets, for the accepted presenters (one per paper). The conference will take place on May 20-22 2024, at the University of Gothenburg.

Victor Lapuente, Director of the Quality of Government Institute.