Good news, bad news: Global prosperity rising amid democratic backsliding
(ots) - A newly released study of global governance finds very broad-based improvements in delivery of public goods even as the 21st century's democratic slippage continues.
The 2026 Berggruen Governance Index (BGI), released 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. It quantifies the widely perceived stalling out of the democratisation wave of the closing decades of the last century that occurred 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 called 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.
The largest improvements across all three components occurred in Gambia, which the report groups with "low-capacity developing states." These states are low scoring across the board but tend to have especially weak public goods provision. This cluster constitutes the poorest countries with the least developed economies.
Bhutan, Georgia, Iraq, and Tunisia - which make up the remaining top five BGI countries recording the biggest improvements - are classified as "capacity-constrained states", which tend to be middle-income with struggling democracies. They 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.
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 this study, Poland and Hungary have both seen government changes via election, despite serious democratic backsliding. Both had moved by 2023 from the group of "consolidated democratic states" - with high scores in all three BGI components - to the capacity constrained category.
The other eight countries at the bottom of the list are all places that once had some semblance of competitive elections, sometimes only briefly, but 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.
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.
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Datum: 06.05.2026 - 23:41 Uhr
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