There’s good news for those concerned about the state of democracy.
The Berggruen Governance Index (BGI) report, released in May, analyzed data from 145 countries falling into one of four forms of governance and concluded that democratic states led their counterparts in all three areas that matter most: democratic accountability, state capacity and public goods provision. The democracies also were best equipped to face future challenges and maintain improvements in the quality of life.
Democracies have “higher fiscal capacity, stronger rule of law, more resilient health and educational infrastructure and the least climate vulnerability,” the report found.
But there’s bad news, too. Despite the functional superiority of democracies, many “face risks from institutional drift and complacency,” which threaten their ability to continue to provide a good quality of life for their people.
Those are among the latest findings from a periodic look at the political world that has become a staple of the international assessment of the state of democracy. The report is a joint project of the Berggruen Institute and the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.
While the world has not become more democratic in the first quarter of this century and “the quality of government has shown no consistent improvement, the quality of life has generally risen” across all forms of government, the report found.
Can improvements in the quality of life be sustained in the face of future challenges? And which governments are most likely able to do so? Again, there’s something to be said for democratic rule: Democracies “lead on virtually every measure of preparedness, just as they do on governance performance.”
Helmut K. Anheier, creator and principal investigator of the BGI and an adjunct professor in the Luskin School of Public Affairs, noted that the latest look at governance around the world contains some sobering facts for the leaders of democracies. Effective as it is as a form of government, it is nevertheless a hard system to maintain, he said.
“Having a democratic system is not enough to make democracy survive in the intermediate or long term,” Anheier said in an interview from Berlin, Germany, where he is also a part-time professor at the Hertie School. The BGI originated there.
For democracies, he stressed, the test often comes down to whether people are confident that their government is genuinely serving their interests. “When you have a democratically elected government,” he said, “that government has to deliver and the people have to feel that democracy works for them and not against them.
“That’s a very, very difficult task to master for most countries,” as it can fall prey to a lack of resources, or slide into corruption or meet other obstacles that cause their citizens to feel that democracy doesn’t work. That’s one of the main messages of the report and helps explain why the so-called “golden age of democracy,” which arose in the late 1980s and early 1990s, around the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, fell short of expectations, he said.
Creating a network
Investor/philanthropist Nicolas Berggruen and journalist Nathan Gardels founded the Berggruen Institute in 2010, forming a global network of thinkers to devise solutions to the challenges of a rapidly changing world. Based in downtown Los Angeles’ Bradbury Building, the institute has offices in Beijing, China, and Venice, Italy. It is developing an approximately 450-acre campus, dubbed Monteverdi, in the Santa Monica Mountains near the 405 freeway.
The institute launched the governance index with Anheier soon after its founding, and the institute and the Hertie School published its first report in 2019.
Gary M. Segura, a UCLA professor of public policy, was dean of the Luskin School in 2020, when the Berggruen Institute awarded Luskin a grant to produce and disseminate the BGI. He oversaw the transition from Hertie and helped bring Anheier back to UCLA.
Segura, a member of the BGI advisory board, sees several important roles for the governance index, including evaluating the effectiveness of governments in meeting the needs of their people and providing solid data to guide leaders in improving how well a government carries out its given tasks. That’s especially important if a government is transitioning from authoritarian to democratic.
“There needs to be scientific information on what to emulate and what not to,” Segura said, noting that political scientists and public policy shapers are especially interested in the BGI.
He also sees the index as a way of “calling balls and strikes” on governments, which are not in a position to objectively evaluate their own performances.
“Governments are not ever to be trusted as their own judges or referees,” Segura said. “And so what I think political scientists and public policy folks do that’s different is that we bring measurement and data to issues where many people bring ideology and emotions.”
Democratic durability — usually
Countries that form democracies tend to stay that way — but not always.
The BGI’s report found little movement from one form of governance to another during the first quarter of the century. Only Jamaica moved into the consolidated democratic states cluster of 39 countries, which includes the United States and Canada, most of Western Europe, South Korea, Costa Rica and Uruguay.
But five countries — Argentina, Botswana, Hungary, Poland and Hong Kong — left the democratic cluster, four falling into the category of “capacity constrained” states while Hong Kong, which passed from British to Chinese rule, moved into the authoritarian category as China tightened its control over the peninsula and island.
The report described capacity-constrained states as those with “reasonably strong democratic accountability but with governments that struggle to deliver.” They include 45 nations, including India, Indonesia, much of Latin America and Croatia, and the recent entries of Hungary and Poland, whose democracies have faltered in recent years and have dropped into this group.
Authoritarian and hybrid states include 29 countries, among them China, Russia and Vietnam. “With few exceptions,” the report found, “their quality of government remains held down by high levels of corruption, casting doubt on how sustainable gains in quality of life will be in the long run.
The 32 countries dubbed low-capacity developing states — including Haiti, Pakistan and much of sub-Saharan Africa — were found to have “the steepest hill to climb on every governance dimension. They are not only the most exposed to future crises and challenges, but they are also the least prepared and lack institutional resilience.”
Anheier said he was struck by “how rarely countries improve their governance performance in significant and sustainable ways.”
Despite their comparatively high rankings, democracies “face many pitfalls,” Anheier said, a major one being that, “because of the political calculus that you have in a democracy, politicians have a tendency to attack shorter-term issues and not think longer than that.”
What democracy does better than other forms of governance is “allow the government to set priorities. Elections are a priority-setting exercise,” Anheier said. “But democracy is not only elections, it’s also important having a rule of law, and having stable institutions like the judiciary and a separation of powers.
“Think of democracy as a package deal,” he added, “that in the medium to long term is better able to deliver a higher quality of life than any other form of governance.”
That’s a principle that is being tested in America today, he noted, as the “Trump administration is creating a lot of damage to the checks and balances in the U.S.”
As with democracy itself, there is reason for both hope and worry: The damage, he said, “can be undone … but unfortunately, it takes longer to fix it than to destroy it.”
