Governance study: Trump comeback deepens divides, weakens institutions
(ots) - Several of the 145 countries in the Berggruen Governance Index (BGI) have undergone decisive political shifts in the three years since the end of the study's 2000-2023 data window, including Poland and, most recently, Hungary. But no country's changes provoked more global hand-wringing than those in the United States of America, where Donald Trump regained the White House.
The world's dominant economic, military, political, technological, and cultural power for at least 35 years, the US ranks 19th in the 2026 BGI, just behind Czechia and Italy and ahead of Latvia and Spain. The report, released Wednesday by an international group of governance scholars, analyses measurable benchmarks for democratic accountability, state capacity and provision of public goods.
US scores in the index suffered a "pronounced decline," especially around the 2016-20 "stress tests placed on constitutional norms during the first Trump administration," the study concluded. Electoral and societal components of the political accountability metric eroded, as Trump refused to concede his 2020 defeat and conjured outlandish conspiracy theories, culminating in the January 2021 mob attack on the US Capitol building.
Compared to other countries in the BGI's consolidated democratic states cluster, the US now suffers unusually high levels of elite factionalization and group grievance, symptoms of the "depth of partisan and social division," the authors said.
Even before Trump regained the presidency, the BGI showed US state capacity lagging both its historical levels and the comparable rich democracies of Northern Europe.
Since retaking office in January 2025, Trump has worsened fiscal deficits, dismantled foreign aid, undermined central bank independence, fired generals, placed alliance and trade treaties in doubt, cut research spending, turned away foreign students, and indiscriminately slashed bureaucracies from tax collection to education, health, agriculture and disaster response.
BGI principal investigator Helmut Anheier, a UCLA sociologist, said that Trump views state capacity as "a deep state."
"The Department of Justice, at the moment, has been decimated. State capacity also means expertise. In the Department of State, a lot of the good, smart people are gone, and that has repercussions from diplomacy to trade policy, then to quality of life and public goods," Anheier said.
The United States, though, is not "going down the drain," given its depth of resources, Anheier emphasized: "But it will take time to rebuild."
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: 07.05.2026 - 00:41 Uhr
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