Open Access

THE BERGGRUEN GOVERNANCE INDEX PROJECT (BGI) analyzes the relationship between democratic accountability, state capacity and the provision of public goods. It builds upon prior work that examined the impact of governance and democracy on the quality of life. It is a collaborative project between the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and the Berggruen Institute.

This paper provides a picture of how societies in the G7 countries have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our point of departure is to examine the effects of the pandemic in terms of four fundamental normative sources for well-being: Solidarity (S; willingness for social cooperation), Agency (A; empowerment to shape one’s prospects through one’s own efforts), GDP (G), and Environmental Performance (E)—SAGE for short. The normative foundations of SAGE are communitarianism, classical liberalism, materialistic utilitarianism, and ecoethics. We find that although G and E responded predictably and uniformly to the pandemic (such as G declining and carbon emissions improving), the societal responses were strikingly different. Societies that are cohesive and empowered (high S and A) may be expected to cope with the pandemic better than those that are fragmented and disempowered (low S and A). Furthermore, the pandemic has had diverse effects on S and A; while some societies became cohering and empowering (rising S and A), others became fragmenting and disempowering (falling S and A), and yet others became fragmenting and empowering. We also show that most G7 countries experienced greater tribalization (measured as the difference between inward S and outward S) during the pandemic. These trends are a matter of concern since they suggest that the willingness and perceived ability to address collective challenges collectively have waned. The analysis also suggests that governments’ social policies may have an important role to play alongside economic and health policies in coping with the pandemic.

The question of whether intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) have a socialization effect on member state preferences is central to international relations. However, empirical studies have struggled to separate the socializing effects of IGOs on preferences from the coercion and incentives associated with IGOs that may lead to foreign policy alignment without altering preferences. This article addresses this issue. We adopt a novel approach to measuring state preferences by applying text analytic methods to country statements in the annual United Nations General Debate (UNGD). The absence of interstate coordination with UNGD statements makes them particularly well suited for testing socialization effects on state preferences. We focus on the European Union (EU), enabling us to incorporate the pre-accession period—when states have the strongest incentives for foreign policy alignment—into our analysis. The results of our analysis show that EU membership has a socialization effect that produces preference convergence, controlling for coercion and incentive effects.