QoG - Quality of Government Institute

23/09/2026

📢 Call for Papers: Conceptualising and Measuring State Capacity

What exactly do we mean by state capacity — and how should we measure it?

State capacity has become part of a shared vocabulary for studying political and economic development across a broad range of fields, but scholars continue to use the term in quite different ways and to operationalise it using very different measures. This makes it difficult to accumulate knowledge and compare findings across studies.

At the 2027 IPSA World Congress of Political Science, Marina Nistotskjaya (QoG) and Andrea Vaccaro (EUI) are convening an open panel aimed at bringing together scholars working on conceptualisation and measurement of state capacity.

They welcome both theoretical and empirical papers that can help move the field towards greater conceptual clarity and empirical precision.

📍 29th IPSA World Congress of Political Science
📅 24–28 July 2027
🔎 Panel: Conceptualising and Measuring State Capacity
📝 RC01 – Concepts and Methods

If you are working on state capacity please consider submitting a paper!

Panel details and submission: https://wc2027.ipsa.org/wc/panel/conceptualising-and-measuring-state-capacity

State capacity is a concept of growing importance in political research. Broadly speaking, it refers to the state’s ability to implement policies, yet there is considerable scholarly disagreement over how exactly to define and measure it, and over what its key dimensions are. This disagreement has...

16/09/2026

🎉 Today we also congratulate our colleague Marina Nistotskaya, who is taking part in a project that has been awarded a grant from VR in this year’s round of funding!

Project: Governing Against Exploitation: Trust, Control, and Welfare Crime in Swedish Municipalities

Emanuel Wittberg (PI), Susanne Wallman Lundåsen (both Linköping) and Marina Nistotskaya

SEK: 4,782,000

👏 Congratulations!

16/09/2026

We are looking for highly motivated, self-driven interns who are interested in Quality of Government as a research area.

📆 Deadline: 31 October 2026.

https://www.gu.se/en/quality-government/qog-for-students-0/internship-at-the-qog-institute

QoG - Quality of Government Institute

Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg

The Quality of Government Institute (QoG) is looking for highly motivated, self-driven interns who are interested in Quality of Government as a research area. The internship provides an excellent opportunity for the student to experience academic work on a day-to-day basis and in an international en...

15/09/2026

🎉 Congratulations to our colleagues who have received funding from the Swedish Research Council´s general call for three exciting new research projects!

Monika Bauhr (PI), together with Nicholas Charron
The Cost of Democracy: How Political Finance Reforms Affect Democratic Legitimacy
Funding: SEK 6.7 million

Andrej Kokkonen (PI), together with Jörgen Möller (Aarhus University)
Chaining the Leviathan: Child Monarchs, Regencies, Power-sharing, and Their Consequences for Politics
Funding: SEK 4.85 million

Valeriya Mechkova (PI), together with Nikolay Marinov, Monika Bauhr, and Evgenia Sarafova
Does Machine Voting Strengthen Electoral Integrity?
Funding: SEK 4.88 million

👏👏👏

10/09/2026

📢 New publication

How can scientific and local knowledge strengthen anti-corruption efforts in development cooperation?

In a new article, our colleagues Hayden Buker and Marina Nistotskaya draw on survey data from Sida programme officers to examine this question. Their findings show that scientific and local knowledge are complementary: using both is associated with higher perceived anti-corruption potential in development projects.

🔗 Read the article: https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642261484341

QoG - Quality of Government Institute

Donor organizations engaged in anti-corruption efforts navigate between research-based and context-responsive approaches, each grounded in distinct forms of kno...

09/09/2026

📢 New publication by our colleagues Jana Schwenk and Jacob R. Gunderson in West European Politics!

In “Broken promises? Voters prefer intraparty democracy, not window dressing,” they ask whether voters care about how democratic party leadership contests actually are. Using a pre-registered conjoint experiment in Spain, they find that voters clearly prefer genuinely democratic primaries: competitive contests with meaningful opportunities for participation.

🔗 Read the article:

Leadership selection is one of a political parties’ key functions, and inclusive leadership selection processes are increasingly common in West European democracies. Yet, inclusive leadership selec...

01/09/2026

Last week, our colleagues Chuwei Chen and Victor Saidi Phiri presented the Local Quality of Government(LoQoG) project: Changing Boundaries: Harmonising Territorial Data for Comparative Subnational Research, at the 65th ERSA Congress “Global Challenges and Regional Responses in a Transition Era”, in Sofia, Bulgaria.

👉Read more about the Local Quality of Government(LoQoG) project:

https://www.qogdata.pol.gu.se/loqog-workshop/

27/08/2026

This week, we kickstarted the semester with a three-day conference, discussing new research on democracy, corruption, political institutions, and the relationship between citizens and the state. Thank you to everyone who participated and contributed to three days of engaging presentations and discussions!

QoG - Quality of Government Institute

12/08/2026

New publication in Regulation & Governance by our colleague Marina Nistotskaya and Joakim Nilsson (Aarhus University).

How does the clarity of legal language affect administrative decision-making?

In a global experimental study involving nearly 900 current and former government officials from 33 countries, the authors examine how officials apply clearer versus less-clear legal texts to a real administrative case involving a building permit.

The findings show that reduced legal clarity leads to less consistent application of the law and increases the likelihood of legally incorrect decisions.

The study highlights an important but often overlooked dimension of the rule of law: clear laws matter not only for citizens’ ability to understand the rules, but also for public officials’ ability to apply them consistently.

🔗

Laws often contain linguistically complex features that increase cognitive processing demands and weaken comprehension. We extend this argument to bureaucratic decision-making by proposing that reduc...

11/08/2026

Losing an election often leaves voters feeling worse about democracy. But what about political trust?

In a new publication in EJPR, our colleagues Nicholas Charron and Jana Schwenk examine how winning and losing elections shape political trust. We use a quasi-experimental design covering elections across several European countries and regions based on the random implementation of the European Quality of Government Index (EQI) Survey during elections.
They also introduce a new way of measuring electoral winners and losers, based on whether results exceed or fall short of recent polling expectations and compare it with established measures of government participation and seat shares.

They find that elections generally boost trust, but with a clear winner–loser gap, particularly when winning means government participation. Populist party voters are especially sensitive to electoral outcomes.

You can find the full open access publication here:

Losing elections, losing trust? A quasi-experimental investigation of the winner-loser gap on political trust