Global governance report highlights future shock risks as democratic accountability slips and state capacity plateaus7.5.2026 09:35:03 EEST | Democracy News Alliance | Press release
Los Angeles/DNA - The newly released 2026 Berggruen Governance Index (BGI) paints a mixed picture of global governance heading into a future of mounting shocks, finding widespread gains in public-goods provision from 2000 to 2023 even as democratic accountability edged down and state capacity showed little overall improvement. The BGI, presented 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. The wave of democratisation observed in the closing decades of the last century has stalled 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 an