Quality of Government and Political Support

This chapter provide an overview of the growing stock of research on the relationship between quality of government and political support. After having been surprisingly absent from the research agenda dealing with support and legitimacy, a growing number of studies have come to demonstrate the importance of impartiality in the implementation of public policies for political support and democratic legitimacy. After outlining a framework for analysis of political support and a discussion of different aspects of quality of government in this body of research, we take a closer look on a number of important contributions that have demonstrated the explanatory power of quality of government when it comes to analyses of variation in political support. In doing so, we distinguish between studies that have assessed the effects of quality of government on the system level (e.g. countries’ level of corruption) and analyses investigating the relationship between individuals’ perceptions of the quality of government and political support.