Introduction

GOOD GOVERNANCE IS AN INCREASINGLY POPULAR TERM IN POLITICAL DIS-Course. Since the 1990s various international organizations, like the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations and the World Bank, have employed this concept as the basis for evaluating the effects of development aid programs in Third World Countries (see, for example, Kaufmann et al. 2008). But the term has also been adopted for use in the context of states in the Western world. In 2002, for example, the influential German Bertelsmann Stiftung, together with municipalities from various Western countries, developed a set of criteria for assessing the quality of local governance (Pröhl 2002; Wegener 2002). Typically, the criteria for good (local) governance provide a mix of standards that focus on both the input side and the output side of the political (sub)system. On the input side good governance is associated with Lincoln’s notion of ‘democracy by the people’, which implies an essentially procedural requirement, that is, that “collectively binding decisions should derive from the authentic expression of the preferences of the constituency in question” (Scharpf 2000: 103). On the output side good governance, as an expression of Lincoln’s ‘democracy for the people’, implies a functional requirement, that is, that the system is effective and efficient in dealing with the collective problems and needs of the constituency (Scharpf 2000).

Although the above illustrates that there is an extensive literature about what policymakers and academics would like to consider as good governance, there is little direct empirical evidence about what citizens consider important in evaluating their systems of governance. This is remarkable because there is widespread consensus that citizens’ views should provide a primary reference point in defining the quality of governance in a democratic system. In this chapter we will therefore first ask:

In answering this question we will not only gain some insight into central tendencies in people’s assessments, but also into the variations, if any, that may be found with respect to such assessments. In the second part of the chapter we will try to explain any such variations, focusing on our second research question: