Is There a Link between Globalization and Governance?

With this paper I investigate empirically the relationship between globalization and governance. To this end, I use a measure of globalization that distinguishes the social and political dimensions of integration from the economic dimension, which allows me to adopt a broader perspective than in existing studies and to examine the effect of these three distinct dimensions of globalization on governance. The results show that those countries with higher levels of integration with the rest of the world tend on the whole to register better governance outcomes. The dimensions of globalization most robustly related with the quality of governance are economic and social integration. These findings are not affected by the inclusion in the analysis of additional explanatory variables, such as GDP per capita, the degree of ethnolinguistic fractionalization, legal origin, religion, natural resource abundance, and government size.