civic duties. Where relevant data are available, topics are analyzed through the lens of government performance, rather than through the citizen’s perspective and experience of the process. For example, the ACE Project’s comparative data set analyzes registration systems adopted worldwide and relates them to government performance under three criteria: currency, accurateness, and completeness (ACE: The Electoral Knowledge Network 2013). It does not address the challenges faced by individuals in the context of each registration system, the requirements with which they need to comply, and the eventual burden of participating in democracy. This is a gap that _Living Life_ aims to close.

# **2.3. Building the Pilot Methodology**

The methodology for _Living Life_ was developed in several steps to incorporate as much feedback as possible from experts across the World Bank and from other teams who have worked on similar initiatives. The steps can be summarized into:

1. Development of the conceptual framework;

2. Questionnaire development; 3. Data collection; and 4. Data validation and coding.

## **2.3.1. Development of the conceptual framework**

The first step identified the key interactions between citizens and governments for which data should be collected. As discussed in the next section, these key interactions were selected through consultation with experts across the World Bank Group as well as a thorough review of the literature. The selected interactions are seen as the interactions that the majority of citizens need to go through in order to execute their civic responsibilities and to access basic services as defined by the 2004 WDR. A fundamental aspect that was defined in the conceptual phase was the specific scope of each area included in the study. It was decided that only the bureaucratic aspects of each representative process would be studied without addressing issues of service quality as this would require a much more complex approach to data collection. For example, for access to education, _Living Life_ observes how burdensome it can be to enroll a child in school, the required documentation, and the fees charged, but it does not include any measure of quality of the education provided.

Even within this limited scope, the initial plan for data collection was very ambitious as it entailed two respondent data groups. For each area of study and in each country, data would be collected through interviews with several experts who would answer questions about processes and regulations applying to a specific prototypical case (contributor data). Second, data was to be collected through a representative survey of citizens who would answer questions about their own experiences (user data). The objectives were to collect information on both the legal framework (or _de jure_ situation) that the common citizen may not know as well as to assess the actual experience of the users of public services ( _de facto_ situation). However, while this represented the optimal approach, the limited budget was insufficient to pilot the user data component. As a result, only the contributor data collection methodology was developed and tested in the pilot.

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