Sociologist: "You need democratic input, you need the signals from the population"
(ots) - The 2026 Berggruen Governance Index (BGI) finds impressive growth in provision of public services across most of the world but troubling stagnation of democratic accountability and state capacity.
Gathering immense data on 145 countries, the study is a collaboration by the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Berlin's Hertie School and the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute. BGI principal investigator Professor Helmut Anheier is a sociologist at the Luskin School and former president of the Hertie School.
Question: The newly released BGI documents meaningful, widespread growth in provision of public goods, encompassing improvements from healthcare to infrastructure. With 135 countries in the report raising levels of public goods between 2000 and 2023, is that an overwhelming success story?
Anheier: Seen in isolation, that's exactly what you would say. The question we have is: Is it sustainable? The public goods in many countries, in consolidated democracies, I would say are sustainable to the extent to which they are not excessively debt-financed, with the US as an example [of excessive borrowing]. ... But in many countries in the Global South, while they show success in public goods, we suspect that they're either selling stuff, like exporting minerals or something like that, or are excessively export oriented. So they, in fact, are exploiting their own population to be competitive in world markets like Vietnam, Cambodia, China is a good example. Or they go into debt.
Q: The BGI is based on a model in which the "governance triangle" has three components that feed back into each other. Can the progress in public goods propel improvements in state capacity and democratic accountability?
Anheier: That's the big question, right? So if you go too far ahead with the public goods provision, then you have to think about how are we financing that, and who's providing it. So you need a certain state capacity, fiscal capacity, delivery capacity, to maintain that and to set the right priorities. You need democratic input. You need the signals from the population. So they don't have to go up and down simultaneously, but they have to play catch up.
Q: The BGI authors group countries with similar patterns of government performance into four groups: consolidated democratic states, capacity-constrained states, authoritarian and hybrid states, and low-capacity developing states. They found just 21 countries that moved - both up and down - in those classifications during the 23-year period covered by the report. Why so few?
Anheier: We have significant inertia, or stability, in how well countries are governed, and they fall into four clusters. These clusters face, to some extent, the same challenges, but also very specific challenges. But they are all relatively under-prepared or ill-prepared for what the future will hold [including demographic and climate change and debt crises]. Unfortunately, this is the worst case scenario for those countries that have weak governance capacities at the moment. They will have, in most instances, no time to catch up. So the world is very likely to drift apart in the next two or three decades.
Q: Do the strong gains in public goods during the 21st century offer short cuts to improved governance?
Anheier: There are two main arguments. One is that all you need is state capacity, and if you have good state capacity, you will have a better quality of life. And the other argument is: What you really need is a flourishing democracy, and then people will push the government to be better at service delivery. And both of them are faulty, as we find, because you need to develop both state capacity and democracy - sometimes in incremental steps, sometimes you have a grand bargain - and only that leads to a sustained level of a higher quality of life. So we, indeed, find that there has been a global trend to a higher quality of life, but we question whether that is really sustainable [without gains in accountability and capacity].
Q: Countries like Jamaica, Kenya, Malaysia, Armenia, and Moldova achieved strong gains across multiple measures. What are the keys to their improvements?
Anheier: So the successful cases that we identify in the report, we call them the balanced performers. They manage to advance on all three [components of the governance triangle]. But what's critical is the advancement on democratic accountability and state capacity, because that leads to higher quality of life. If you only advance in a higher quality of life, then you get into sustainability problems. ... The world is going to improve one country at a time. Each country has to find its own way. There's not one solution that fits all. Countries have to go through this painful process. ... It takes time. Jamaica is the only country that moved in [to the group of consolidated democracies] because they had really good policies over multiple legislative cycles, and that's the key.
The full report, '2026 Berggruen Governance Index - The Four Worlds of Governance (https://ucla.app.box.com/s/pjetkgv6tw9mi2m197qmnoyf1v6nxuu8)', can be viewed and downloaded from the website of the UCLA's Luskin School.
Interview: Frank Fuhrig, DNA
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Datum: 06.05.2026 - 23:54 Uhr
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