Between Public Evaluation of Government Performance and Procedural Effectiveness: The Case of Central and Eastern European Countries

There are three basic approaches of measuring government performance. The first assesses the procedural (“bureaucratic”) performance in the scope of competencies of the authority (be it central, local, regional government). Second approach focuses on socio-economic development of a polity. Third and last methodological approach make use of public opinion surveys. All methods have its pros an cons. Yet the researchers frequently underestimates its methodological problems. For example, the subjective evaluation of government performance is biased by the socio-economic status of a respondent in a survey. As an illustration serves a study of the NUTS2 regions conducted by the EU Commission Regional Governance Matters. The within-state variation of the perceived performance correlates with the overall level of socioeconomic status (SES). Therefore, the study does not actually measure the government performance but rather structurally disadvantaged regions. Yet the study does not claim the opinion survey is an objective measure of government performance. However, some scholars does not made this distinction clear. For example, a study on social capital and government performance in Iceland of Vilhelmsdóttir (2012: 5) finds a very strong positive correlation between those two concepts. This was rather due to the methodological approach as the social capital and the government performance was measured by means of opinion survey. Two variable were thus not exogenously measured. To tackle above mentioned analytical difficulties, the aim of the paper is to measure the government performance exogenously, and to compare the procedural objective performance with an perceived performance by the citizens in large scale international surveys (ESS, EVS etc.). The case selections are the post-communist states of Central and Eastern Europe that had accessed the EU. There are two phase of a study. Firstly, the performance indexes such as the Governance Matters of World Bank are regressed on a set of independent variables that had been hypothesized in the literature should have influence the performance such as the social capital, government fragmentation, government turnover, type of coalition government etc. The regression with panel corrected standard errors is employed controlling for unit heterogeneity and stationarity. On this is build subsequent phase of a research that tackle the questions of perceived evaluation. A hierarchical level regression is used for controlling SES of the respondents and other individual characteristics that generally affects the attitudes and evaluations on the first level, and the contextual country factors (that are preselected based on the previous models) are employed on the second level. This complex research design allows us to determine the differences between perceived performance evaluations and whether the second level contextual variables can explain the variation in perceived performance among states. The preliminary results shows, that the objectives measures of World Bank are correlated with government fragmentation (negatively) and social capital (positively). As for the HLM of individual survey, only small part of second level variance was explained by those.