2026 Berggruen Governance Index
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Wednesday, May 6, 2026
Four Worlds of Governance: The newly released 2026 Berggruen Governance Index finds improvement in the quality of life globally while raising concerns about sustainability as many countries are ill-prepared to master future crises and challenges.
Despite a dizzying pace at which technological, economic, and geopolitical changes are reshaping the global landscape, the underlying patterns of governance performance have barely shifted – while a small group of countries is slowly charting a path to progress, many more are unable to advance or threaten to fall behind.
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LOS ANGELES – Even with compounding global crises – climate change, pandemics, wars, democratic backsliding, and political paralysis– the underlying patterns of governance performance have remained remarkably stable over the last quarter century, according to the 2026 Berggruen Governance Index (BGI) released today by the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, in partnership with the Berggruen Institute and the Hertie School in Berlin.
The Index measures 145 countries across three dimensions – the quality of democracy, the quality of government, and the quality of life – from 2000 through 2023. The researchers find that countries sort into four enduring performance patterns, which the report calls “worlds of governance.” This four-world pattern has been stable for a quarter century, with the great majority of countries remaining in the same “world” throughout. This is a serious problem, according to the researchers, as many countries, having failed to boost their performance capacities, now seem ill-prepared to manage rapid changes and potential future crises.
“The most striking finding, on a quarter century of data, is how rarely countries improve their governance performance in significant and sustainable ways,” said Helmut K. Anheier, the Index’s principal investigator. “The same four configurations re-emerge regardless of when we look. But the countries that have moved durably tell us something important: they did not choose between democracy and state capacity. They built both.”
The Four Worlds
How well prepared are the four worlds to master the challenges ahead? The researchers looked at various dimensions of economic, environmental, technological and social preparedness and arrived at mixed results:
• Consolidated Democratic States – 39 countries scoring high on every Index dimension. Most of Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Canada, and the United States. While they face issues of policy inertia, and some struggle with political dysfunction, they are generally in a better position to absorb shocks and future challenges than any other cluster.
• Capacity-Constrained States – 45 countries with reasonably strong democratic accountability but governments that struggle to deliver. India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and much of Latin America, but also European countries such as Croatia, Hungary, and Poland are found here. They are more vulnerable but can succeed if they balance growth in both democracy and state capacity over time to secure a higher quality of life at sustainable levels. Otherwise, they risk being trapped in a vicious cycle where underperformance in some dimensions wipes out gains in others.
• Authoritarian and Hybrid States – 29 countries, including China, Russia, the Gulf states, Belarus, and Vietnam, that deliver a quality of life at levels comparable to Capacity-Constrained Democracies, but with very little democratic accountability. With few exceptions, 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.
• Low-Capacity Developing States – 32 countries, including Haiti, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea and much of sub-Saharan Africa, with 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.
Drifting Apart?
The researchers are concerned that the stable patterns of these four worlds of governance suggest that the world as whole will drift further apart: a Consolidated Democratic cluster that is, at least in principle, able to respond to climate change, pandemics, economic upheavals, and the like, and the great majority of the world’s countries largely unable or struggling to do so.
Indeed, across a quarter century, only one country – Jamaica – joined the Consolidated Democratic cluster. Five countries left it: Argentina, Botswana, Hungary, Poland, and Hong Kong. The strongest cluster, the Index finds, is much harder to enter than to leave. By contrast, the group of Authoritarian and Hybrid countries is easier to join and more difficult to escape.
However, as Joseph C. Saraceno, the Index’s project manager and data scientist at UCLA Luskin, points out, there are also balanced governance performers. “They have invested simultaneously in democratic accountability and state capacity, rather than in pushing for quick wins in quality of life alone.” They are Armenia, Moldova, Malaysia, The Gambia, Angola, and Sierra Leone. To the researchers, they point to a promising path to improved governance performance and greater resilience.
About the Berggruen Governance Index
The Berggruen Governance Index is a joint research initiative of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, the Berggruen Institute, and the Hertie School in Berlin. The 2026 edition is the fourth in the series. The full report, executive summary, dataset, and interactive country profiles are available at governance.luskin.ucla.edu.
About the Berggruen Institute
Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. Since its founding, the Berggruen Institute has forged new conceptual frameworks to meet the challenges and harness the opportunities of the arriving future. As an independent think and action tank, the Institute has the autonomy to step outside the usual lanes, reaching beyond academic disciplines to bridge social divides, partisan dispositions, and cultural boundaries. This cross-fertilization, joined with a unique capacity to connect and convene a diverse global network of relationships, gives them the ability to spread actionable ideas and influence events.
About the Hertie School
For over 20 years, the Hertie School has been teaching, researching, and debating good governance and public affairs in the heart of Berlin and Europe. The social science university offers master's degrees, doctoral programmes, and executive education to train change-makers in government, business, and civil society. True to its motto "Understand today. Shape tomorrow." the university conducts interdisciplinary research, provides international and practice-oriented education, and serves as a forum for public debate. Six centres of competence strengthen its expertise in European affairs, international security, fundamental rights, sustainability, digital governance, and data science. The Hertie School was founded in 2004 by the non-profit Hertie Foundation and has been generously supported by it ever since. It is a member of the European university alliance CIVICA, publicly recognised, and accredited by the Accreditation Council as well as the German Council of Science and Humanities. www.hertie-school.org