Rezension: Bågenholm, Andreas, Bauhr, Monika, Grimes, Marcia, & Rothstein, Bo (2021) (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Quality of Government

Abstract

The Oxford Handbook of the Quality of Government delivers an authoritative and comprehensive overview of the foundations and findings from the Quality of Government (QoG) research agenda, mainly developed at the QoG Institute founded in 2004 in Gothenburg, Sweden. Starting from a rather narrow concept of QoG, focusing on impartiality, the handbook argues forcefully that the quality of public institutions is crucial for all kinds of social, economic, and political outcomes, that higher levels of QoG are related to higher levels of human well-being and political legitimacy, and are therefore more important than, for example, levels of liberal democracy. This rather narrow perspective of the handbook turns out to be one of its strengths, since all contributions start from identical concepts, while discussing all kinds of theoretical, empirical, and critical objections. All contributions offer very helpful overviews and systematic summaries of existing literature and are therefore very well suited for reading lists in academic courses, both in political science, public administration, and public management, but also in other areas like development studies, and especially also for scholars who may be skeptical of this approach.