Los Angeles/DNA (OTE) – The newly released 2026 Berggruen Governance
Index (BGI) paints a
mixed picture of global governance heading into a future of mounting
shocks, finding widespread gains in public-goods provision from 2000
to 2023 even as democratic accountability edged down and state
capacity showed little overall improvement.
The BGI, presented Wednesday by an international group of
governance scholars, analyses measurable benchmarks of democratic
accountability across 145 countries.
On a 100-point scale, the global score for democratic
accountability slipped slightly from 65 in 2000 to 64 in 2023, the
most recent data used in the project. The wave of democratisation
observed in the closing decades of the last century has stalled in
the last 15 years. Democratic accountability fell in 54 countries
while it improved in 48 countries.
Yet the BGI — a collaborative project of the Luskin School of
Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA),
Berlin’s Hertie School and the Berggruen Institute, a think tank
headquartered in Los Angeles — captures remarkably widespread growth
in provision of public goods.
Encompassing healthcare, education, infrastructure, environmental
sustainability and conditions to foster employment and rising
prosperity, public goods improved in 135 of the countries studied,
while declining slightly in just four. The global average jumped from
58 to 69 points from 2000 to 2023.
The third component of what the BGI authors refer to as the
“governance triangle” is state capacity, defined as the ability to
tax, borrow and spend, control territory, operate scrupulous,
competent bureaucracies and administer predictable rule of law. The
index finds the global average ticking up from 48 to 49 points; 56
countries had increased state capacity while 57 declined.
“What does it tell us about the world ahead?” Prof. Helmut K.
Anheier, a Luskin School sociologist and BGI principal investigator,
asked during the public release of the 2026 BGI on the UCLA campus.
“Countries are not really improving in their governance
performance in significant ways. … We’re not really having forward-
looking investment in governance capacity. There is considerable
inertia.“
The largest improvements across all three BGI components occurred
in Gambia, which the report groups with “low-capacity developing
states.” These states score low across the board, particularly in the
provision of public goods. This cluster constitutes the poorest
countries with the least developed economies, which face the most
serious challenges.
“They have the greatest exposure to likely future crises, whether
it’s global warming, whether it’s a new pandemic, whether it’s
another financial crisis, whether it’s the impact of AI,” Anheier
said. “And they have the least capacity to respond to it.”
Bhutan, Georgia, Iraq and Tunisia — which make up the remaining
top five countries with the largest improvements in the BGI — are
classified as “capacity-constrained states.” They tend to be middle-
income with struggling democracies. These countries score higher
across the board than the low-capacity developing states, but their
state capacity tends to lag compared to public goods and democratic
accountability.
The capacity-constrained states risk falling into “a cycle that
erodes the institutions they have built,” Anheier said.
“Consolidated democratic states”, a cluster of most of the
world’s richest countries, which score highly in all three BGI
components, have to confront domestic complacency. Further, in the
United States and some others, “political dysfunction” is leaving
mounting problems unaddressed and risking erosion of state capacity,
Anheier said.
At the other end of the spectrum, the country with the farthest
fall on the BGI since 2000 is Nicaragua. Second from last is
Venezuela, followed by Hong Kong, Hungary and Turkey. The rest of the
bottom 10 are Russia, Iran, Poland, El Salvador and Belarus.
Since 2023, which is the last year of data available for the
study, Poland and Hungary have both seen government changes via
election, despite serious democratic backsliding. Both had fallen out
of the group of “consolidated democratic states” by 2023 and moved
into the capacity constrained cluster.
The other eight countries at the bottom of the list are all
places that once had some semblance of competitive elections, but by
now have little or no remaining pretense of democracy. They are
grouped by the authors among the “authoritarian and hybrid states”,
which have by far the lowest democratic accountability but outperform
even some struggling democracies in delivering public goods.
These regimes have tended toward faster economic growth in the
period observed. But that seeming prosperity, typically fueled by
extractive industries or overreliance on exports, masks “serious
institutional weaknesses in these countries, including divided
elites,” Anheier said.
Relatively few countries — 21 of the 145 — changed enough for
better or worse to be classified in a new group by the end of the 23-
year study period.
“Movement between them is rare, but this is largely what we
should expect,” said Stella Ghervas, a UCLA historian on a panel of
experts who discussed the BGI findings Wednesday. “Government systems
are not created in a moment. They evolve over long periods of time.”
Local conditions shaping governance in each country can rarely be
quickly reset through political will or even external shocks, Joseph
C. Saraceno, a Luskin School data scientist and BGI co-author, said
Wednesday.
“Despite all the talk of major transformations happening in
global affairs, the underlying configuration of governance simply
doesn’t appear to change very much,” Saraceno said. “We use the term
inertia to describe this reoccurring pattern. In other words, the
structures of global governance are resistant to movement as the
conditions beneath them are quite sticky: political economies,
demographics, resource endowments. These are deeply layered, and they
push each country toward the world that it already inhabits.”
But the challenges lurking around the world may not wait for the
slow and difficult processes of political change and development to
catch up.
“With the few exceptions of those countries in the consolidated
democratic world,” Anheier said, “the great majority of the countries
in the world is ill-prepared for the future.”
The full report, ‚ 2026 Berggruen Governance Index – The Four
Worlds of Governance ‚, can be viewed and downloaded from the website
of the UCLA’s Luskin School.
Frank Fuhrig, DNA
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