The principal data source for our further analysis is the World Values Survey (WVS) project, conducted by WVS Association (see WVS, 2008). Table A2 shows its characteristics in comparison with other potential data sources. WVS provides an acceptable compromise of consistency and coverage for showing an initial picture of citizen-centric governance indicators. On the one hand, WVS publishes quite outdated information (with the time lag of 2-3 years after actual survey was taken), and only a few questions from this survey are relevant for our purposes (since the survey is about cultural values, not governance). On the other hand, WVS provides quite comprehensive geographical coverage (97 countries with all major economies included) combined with acceptable time coverage and questionnaire.

The coding (which is used further in text and in the dataset) and questions assigned to each sub-criterion of governance are presented in the Table A1 of Appendix. As one can see, for a few sub-criteria, specified in the Table 1 of the paper, no survey questions are available. This is a drawback of WVS, as this survey was not constructed to evaluate governance. However, each governance outcome has a sufficient representation by questions in order to get reasonable estimates.

Based on the data from WVS (questions from the Table A1 of Appendix), as well as from the other freely available data sources (AFR, ASB, TI GCB - see Table A2 for notation), a unique dataset was constructed, which can be used for the evaluation of citizen-centric governance indicators by any researcher. 421994 people’s responses (256152 of them by WVS) on 74 different questions (20 from WVS) are recorded in this dataset. 125 countries are covered, 97 of them by WVS. The records in the dataset can be sorted by the gender, income, education of a respondent, as well as by the sub national administrative unit of his/her residency.

For the reasons explained above our main estimation procedure is based on 3 waves of the World Values Surveys depending on the year when the surveys were taken. Wave 1 includes countries surveyed from 1994 to 1998, wave 2 - from 1999 to 2004, and wave 3 - from 2004 to 2008. In addition to questions from WVS, in the wave 3 we also use one question about corruption from Transparency International Global Corruption Barometer (see TI, 2005).

As an alternative to the WVS, we apply additional data sources in our estimation of citizen-centric governance indicators. In particular, in this paper we report the results when using Gallup World Poll data points, which are available freely from the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) project (see WBI, 2008).<sup>3</sup> 4 questions from GWP are used in WGI. While this coverage is quite limited, yet it allows us to estimate 3 governance outcomes for a wide range of countries.

# 3.2 Aggregation

The underlying assumption of our empirical investigation is that the quality of governance in a given country directly affects governance outcome, which is being analyzed in a certain survey question. Thus, the answers of survey respondents - citizens of this country - are better for each question the higher is the quality of governance in the country. At the same time, answers of the respondents are random

> 3Gallup World Poll, described in the Table A2, is itself very expensive (28 thousands US Dollars per year), and therefore cannot be used as a base for a rigorous, replicable research

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