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Governance is at the heart of how well governments meet public needs and manage a wide array of common problems. Why do some countries perform poorly in delivering healthcare, reducing inequality, providing a clean environment or delivering some other public good to their populations even while they have the resources to do so? Does the capacity of states to provide the basics for societies to thrive depend on forms of democratic accountability that represents different interests, or are systems under technocratic control that impose solutions and disregard, even suppress, many voices better at meeting public needs? Existing indices do not systematically examine the relationship between the components that contribute to governance performance. In our understanding of governance, depicted as the Governance Triangle, public goods provision is a function of state capacity and accountability. Rather than focusing on a single composite performance measure, the Berggruen Governance Index examines the interactions among these dimensions. We find that the key to good governance is achieving a balance among the three dimensions on an upward and sustainable trajectory. This article introduces the Index and the conceptual and methodological framework that underpins it and then outlines the content of this special issue.
Nominally, the social sciences maintain the ideological aspiration of a unified, global endeavor for a better understanding of human societies, their economies, cultures, and polities. Over 150 years after their founding period, there is significant fragmentation and unevenness in this quest to understand the human condition. Distinct hierarchies and exclusionary structures emerged between the “West” and regions like Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, China and India and many parts of Asia. Some countries, even entire regions, are terra incognita from a Western vantage point and relegated to “area studies.” At the same time, distinct social science traditions have formed in countries and regions outside the West, with a new interest in developing approaches that rely less on Western foundations and conventional academic practices.
The questions become: Are the social sciences drifting further apart, or is there a possibility of greater dialogue, even cohesiveness, to advance our knowledge and understanding globally rather than only in some regions or countries? And if so, why, how, and for what? What are the main foci in research and teaching? What is the degree of institutionalization, and how could the global, regional, and national potentials of the social sciences be better realized?
To approach these questions, Global Perspectives launches systematic assessments of the state and the potential of the social sciences in different parts of the world. They address five key issue clusters: Western hegemony and fragmentation; basic conceptual and epistemological considerations; ideologies and normative foundations; academic freedom; and professionalization and commercialization. Given the significant scale and complex scope of the social sciences with their many specific subfields, methodologies, and curricula as well as varying degrees of professional institutionalization and different political backgrounds, the special collections present reflective essays on the state and the potential of the social sciences rather than comprehensive empirical stock-taking.
This article goes beyond the presentation, assessment and discussion of the Berggruen Governance Index by suggesting potential next steps for governance indicators and relevant data systems more generally. Specifically, it addresses four ways to advance research on governance performance. The first two, greater cross-validation and cross-fertilisation and a systematic assessment of the legal-regulatory context, address the two major challenges of current research, namely the weak connection between the theoretical understanding of governance and the current stock of indicators as well as the tenuous connection between conceptually grounded indices on the one hand and the needs of policymakers to have actionable results on the other. The other two proposals, that is the development of governance operationalisations based on network structures and the notion of planetary governance, suggest transcending the current nation-state and variable-based frame for governance indices towards actor-based indicators and dashboards.
This article looks at some of the major implications for theory and policy that follow from the Berggruen Governance Index (BGI). After discussing the BGI's quality as an indicator in more general terms, the article explores two types of implications. The first are conceptual implications that relate to an improved understanding of governance, democracy and economic development. They illustrate the highly contingent patterns that emerge from the Governance Triangle—the basis of the BGI's conceptual framework—for high-, middle- and low-income countries as well as political regimes, and caution against any notions of simple causalities in how countries develop. Second, we address policy implications in terms of managing the tensions inherent in the Governance Triangle in view of longer-term sustainability and resilience based on insights that can be gained with the help of the BGI.
The countries of the Sub-Saharan region have, on average, made significant progress in governance performance, especially in terms of democratic accountability and public goods provision—findings that seem to contradict patterns of state fragility and economic underdevelopment common in the region. This article explores this seeming contradiction and presents in more detail findings from the Berggruen Governance Index regarding the governance performance of five countries, namely Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa. Lagging state capacity and growing sovereign debt emerge as critical factors, and the article suggests that they may be responsible for the inability of many countries in the region to consolidate gains in governance as well as economic performance.
The Berggruen Governance Index (BGI) is a new and innovative entry into the crowded domain of quantitative governance research. In its effort to contribute to the field, the BGI builds off of and acts in dialogue with several other governance indicator projects from across the globe. As part of a collaborative outlook, the BGI convened the first of three symposia at the UCLA Luskin School in October 2022, titled ‘Advancing Governance Indicator Systems: The 2022 Conference’. The event invited representatives from other indicator projects to share their thoughts on the BGI, present their own projects and discuss avenues for further research and development of ‘planetary’ indicators. This article discusses the highlights and key contributions from the conference.
This article presents an overview of some of the main findings from our analysis of the Berggruen Governance Index for the 2000–2019 period. It first examines overall governance performance across world regions, singles out general trends and identifies top and bottom performers. It then briefly reviews the comparative governance performance of world powers like the United States, Brazil, China, major European countries, India and Russia as well as other selected countries in the post-Soviet space. Finally, we address more analytic questions to show the versatility of the index for hypothesis testing and theoretical purposes.
Civil society has re-entered the standard social sciences vocabulary, and important contributions have been made in recent years to advance the historical understanding and conceptual development of this sphere analytically located between the state and the market. Such contributions have been mostly within a political science perspective that examines civil society in the context of a particular country or region or in reference to the emerging field of non-profit studies. What has been missing is a broader perspective within a comparative institutional framework that places the capacity of civil society for self-organisation and self-correction relative to the capacity of the state to control and regulate. Frequently, these two capacities are in conflict with each other, and exploring their relationship may suggest new answers to the question of what makes civil society develop and be sustainable in the long run.
In this interview, Helmut K. Anheier and Michael Mann first discuss Mann’s work on the sociology of power, especially the types and sources of power. They then focus on the rise and fall of empires and his analysis of wars, as well as current international tensions, especially US-China relations and a revisionist Russia. Throughout, they focus on longer-term economic and sociopolitical developments that may affect the future of the liberal order.