Comparing the quality of governance across the European Union member countries: a grey relational analysis approach

The concept of governance indicates a process that is associated with the forming of the rules and regulations by independent actors that can guide the countries to develop in political, social, and economic areas. Therefore, monitoring and ranking of the European Union (EU) member countries’ governance performance have great importance for policy-makers. Six main governance indicators are identified in the Worldwide Governance Indicators report conducted by the World Bank. The governance indicators enable us to answer questions such as which countries are being governed well or which countries are behind at governance. However, few studies examine the countries at the aggregated level of governance indicators. This article intends to fill this gap by providing a new framework (grey relational analysis) for analysing the governance quality of countries. The analysis covers the governance indicators data of the period from 2013 to 2020 of the EU-28 countries. Through this study enabled the evaluation of country performances in an internationally accepted normative framework, the performance changes of countries are explained over the years, and it is possible to analyse the progress made by the countries in detail at the point of good governance.