Dissecting the causal chain from quality of government to political support

This chapter investigates to what extent cross-national differences in political support can be explained by the quality of government. The quality of government perspective implies that the executive ought to be bound by its own rules: impartiality and rule of law. The chapter formulates and tests hypotheses about the effects of governmental impartiality, rule of law, bureaucratic professionalism, and corruption on citizens’ political support using data from the ESS 2012. Of these indicators, it is the impartiality of policy implementation by the national bureaucracy that stands out as a consistently significant, robust, and strong predictor of political support.