The Impact Of Cultural And Institutional Factors On The Qualiyt Of Government

The quality of government is defined as a government's capacity of formulating and implementing public policies, and delivering public services. This paper is to explore the extent to which cultural and institutional factors as explanatory variables have influence on the quality of government. This paper holds the opinion that government capacity and government autonomy are the two main dimensions which constitute the quality of government, and based on this idea, this paper explores the impact of cultural and institutional factors on each dimension. By using data from Asia Barometer Survey 2010-2012(provided by East Asia Democratic Studies), this paper examines the influence of cultural and institutional factors on the perceived quality of government in mainland China and Taiwan from each two dimensions.The findings show that, firstly, there is difference between mainland China and Taiwan in terms of the dimension of government capacity and government autonomy. Secondly, when it comes to the dimension of the government capacity, cultural and institutional factors have some influence on the perceived quality of government in two areas, but play different roles,especially the cultural and institutional factors exert a greater influence on the mainland China than that in Taiwan. Thirdly, in the dimension of government autonomy, only the factor of the degree of democracy has significant impact on mainland China's government decision-making autonomy, while the results show that the institutional factors have no significant impact on Taiwan. And some cultural factors like the obedience to authoritarian account for public's perception of the decision-making autonomy of government on both districts. What's more, the influence of cultural and institutional factors on the perceived government impartiality is greater and more significant, there exists three institutional factors like the degree of democracy which have significant influence on the perceived government impartiality, while the cultural factor like obedience to the government's decision plays significant role on the perceived government impartiality on both mainland China and Taiwan.