What is the “Quality of Government” ? What is its definition and how can it be empirically measured? After the early years, when research on governance has largely been dominated by economic studies analyzing the relationship between economic growth and institutions, in recent years this subject has begun to attract the attention of many other researchers who are interested in studying the effects and causes of so-called “Quality of Government” in non-economic areas of social research (Rothstein and Teorell 2008). The aim of this work is to include the analysis of the quality of government within the research agenda of the empirical studies of democracy. The recognition of the connection of the Quality of Government with the other dimensions of democracy allows to develop a dialogue with the literature on the quality of democracy, overcoming the previous isolation in economic theories. This paper is structured as follows: in the first part we will analyze the existing literature on the Quality of Government, highlighting the origin and the evolution of the concept and its use within different disciplines. In the second part an original definition of Quality of Government will be proposed, specifying in detail its possible use in empirical research.
