Project Syndicate
Democracy, Autocracy, or Something Else?
Aug 7, 2026
Helmut K. Anheier, Edward L. Knudsen and Joseph C. Saraceno
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the world is neither converging on liberal democracy nor being swept by an authoritarian tide. The decisive political struggles of the 21st century will be won or lost through the unglamorous work of strengthening democratic accountability and building effective institutions.
BERLIN—This year has been marked by striking political upheavals. For supporters of liberal democracy, the most encouraging news came in April, when Hungarian voters brought an end to former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s 16-year project of building an authoritarian model that he dubbed “illiberal democracy.” Defying the odds and the Fidesz party’s manipulation of public and private media, Hungarians handed Péter Magyar’s Tisza party a landslide victory, making him prime minister.
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Orbán had turned Hungary into a model for aspiring autocrats across the European Union and the West. Although Hungary was not the first European country to reject authoritarian populism—Poland did so in 2023 by voting the Law and Justice (PiS) party out of power—Orbán’s defeat showed that even Europe’s most entrenched illiberal regime could be voted out of office.
A month later, however, the summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping offered a starkly different vision of global politics. At its core was what Chinese officials called a “constructive China-US relationship of strategic stability,” based on pragmatic cooperation on trade, agriculture, and energy.
During the summit, Xi reportedly urged Trump to avoid the so-called Thucydides Trap—conflict resulting from an incumbent hegemon’s fear of a rising challenger—and work together more closely. Viewed alongside Xi’s continued consolidation of power and Trump’s increasingly autocratic agenda, the meeting raised the prospect of a new authoritarian era, driven not by rogue states like Russia but by the world’s two superpowers.
Which of these developments will define the future of global politics? The answer is far from clear. But the contrast between them reflects a deeper tension between two competing governance models identified by the 2026 Berggruen Governance Index (BGI).
In its fourth edition, the BGI assesses governance across 145 countries between 2000 and 2023. Rather than reducing governance to a single indicator, the index focuses on three interconnected dimensions: government quality (state capacity), democratic quality (accountability), and quality of life (the provision of public goods). Together, these form what the BGI calls the “Governance Triangle.”
Crucially, the BGI’s headline findings paint a more complex picture than familiar narratives of governance resurgence, consolidation, or decline would suggest. It shows that, rather than converging toward a single model, countries consistently cluster into four distinct “governance worlds.”
These classifications represent recurring empirical patterns. Year after year, the statistical analysis identifies the same four groups, with remarkably little movement between them. Between 2000 and 2023, more than 80% of countries remained in the same governance world.
This stability is striking given the shocks of the past quarter-century: the 2008 global financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous wars and civil conflicts, and the prospect of a democratic recession. Yet despite these upheavals, the BGI finds that the underlying patterns of domestic governance have been far more resilient than news headlines imply.
The Four Worlds of Governance
What are governance worlds, and what distinguishes them? The first comprises 39 consolidated democratic states that score highly across all three dimensions of governance. Most of Western Europe—along with the United States, Japan, South Korea, Uruguay, and Costa Rica—belongs to this group. While many of these countries struggle with policy inertia and political dysfunction, they remain better equipped to absorb shocks and adapt to future challenges.
Next are the capacity-constrained states, a group of 45 countries with reasonably strong democratic accountability and governments that struggle to deliver a high quality of life. India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and much of Latin America fall into this category. Although these countries are more vulnerable, they can still advance if democratic institutions and state capacity develop together over time. Otherwise, they risk becoming trapped in a vicious cycle in which weaknesses in one dimension erase gains in another.
The third group encompasses 29 authoritarian and hybrid states, including China, Russia, the Gulf countries, Belarus, and Vietnam. Their quality of life is comparable to that of capacity-constrained democracies, albeit with far less democratic accountability. Pervasive corruption, however, continues to undermine state capacity, casting doubt on the long-term sustainability of these gains.
Lastly, the BGI identifies 32 low-capacity developing states, including Haiti, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, and much of Sub-Saharan Africa. These countries rank lowest across every dimension of governance. They are not only the most exposed to future crises but also the least equipped to respond, lacking the necessary institutional resilience.
Taken together, the BGI’s findings suggest that these four groups will drift further apart in their ability to confront future crises. Consolidated democracies, at least in principle, will be able to respond to climate change, pandemics, and economic upheaval. Most other countries will struggle or fail to meet the same challenges.
The past quarter-century offers little reason to think otherwise. During that period, only one country, Jamaica, joined the consolidated democratic world, while five left it: Argentina, Botswana, Hungary, Poland, and Hong Kong. The BGI finds that it is far harder to enter this group than to leave. By contrast, once countries enter the authoritarian and hybrid group, they are much less likely to escape.
In other words, the world is not converging on liberal democracy, as the “end of history” optimists of the post-Cold War era assumed. Nor is it being swept by an authoritarian tide. Instead, the defining feature of global governance today is stasis.
The Fragile Authoritarian Bargain
Hungary stands out as one of the few countries to move between governance worlds by sliding backward, though the BGI data end in 2023 and therefore do not capture the likely democratizing effects of Magyar’s election victory.
In 2000, Hungary firmly belonged to the group of consolidated democratic states. Its democratic-accountability score stood at 85 (on a scale of 0–100), reflecting the hard-won gains of its post-communist transition. By 2023, however, that score had fallen to 60. The 25-point decline reflected Orbán’s systematic dismantling of institutional checks, contributing to a 28-point drop in Hungary’s media and civil-society score and an 18-point fall in state capacity.
The country’s democratic backsliding quickly became an international reference point, inspiring populist authoritarians around the world and encouraging neighboring countries like Slovakia to follow a similar path. Yet even as its institutions weakened, Hungarians’ quality of life remained largely intact, sustained by debt-financed public spending and substantial EU subsidies. This illustrates one of the BGI’s main findings: high-quality public goods do not necessarily require sound democratic governance.
Hungary’s experience also demonstrates that democratic backsliding is not irreversible. While democracy is neither resurgent nor inevitably self-correcting, the world is not moving inexorably toward less political freedom and accountability.
China provides a powerful counterexample. Its democratic-accountability score fell from an already low 29 in 2000 to just 17 in 2023. Institutional, electoral, and societal accountability all weakened, and restrictions on civil society intensified. Despite its reputation for administrative efficiency, its state capacity stood at just 45 in 2023, below the global average of 49. Meanwhile, its public-goods score rose from 61 to 77, driven by massive public investment that lifted its infrastructure score from 73 to 97.
China thus achieved substantial improvements in living standards while suppressing democratic freedoms and without exceptional state capacity. Decades of export-led growth and rapid industrialization generated the resources needed to invest heavily in infrastructure, education, and other public goods. Rising living standards, in turn, strengthened the political legitimacy of one-party rule.
But the authoritarian bargain is a worse bet than its apparent successes suggest. Autocratic stability is a myth; authoritarian and hybrid countries suffer from deep structural weaknesses. Among the four governance worlds, only the low-capacity developing states are more fragile and less peaceful.
Autocracy often fails to produce stable or resilient states. Countries in this cluster are the highest per-capita carbon emitters, even as the global economy shifts toward decarbonization. They also have the lowest levels of female political empowerment, leaving much of their human potential untapped. Compounding these weaknesses, many remain heavily dependent on resource rents instead of building knowledge-intensive industries.
While some authoritarian and hybrid states have become much more effective at providing public goods, only Singapore has translated those advances into broader governance improvements. By contrast, eight of the ten countries with the largest declines in governance performance since 2000 belong to this cluster.
Nor has the authoritarian world expanded much, despite repeated predictions that it would. And the few countries that have joined it were not fully democratic to begin with. This may be because many governments recognize the authoritarian model’s inherent weaknesses. It often buys today’s public goods by mortgaging tomorrow’s capacity, relying on state-directed investment rather than broad-based, inclusive institutions.
In fact, the impressive development gains achieved by authoritarian countries were possible precisely because they removed many of the institutional constraints—independent courts, a free press, and a vibrant civil society—that can slow decision-making but also enable sustained governance improvements. What may look like an impediment to rapid growth is often the very system of democratic checks and balances that enables societies to learn from and correct their mistakes.
China is a case in point. Its stability, much like Russia’s before 2022, ultimately depends on sustained economic growth. If that growth falters, the regime will increasingly have to rely on repression, a strategy that seldom produces enduring stability.
Authoritarianism, American-Style
Trump’s second term demonstrates how profoundly a country can change without leaving its governance world. US democratic accountability stood at 91 in 2000 and peaked at 96 in 2013, midway through Barack Obama’s presidency. Yet early hopes of institutional renewal soon gave way to partisan gridlock and self-imposed fiscal constraints.
Trump’s first election in 2016 accelerated that decline. Democratic accountability fell to 85 by 2020 as electoral integrity and societal accountability weakened amid intense political polarization during his first term. Under Joe Biden, the score recovered modestly to 89, but Trump’s second presidency is likely to reverse those gains once new data become available. The Supreme Court’s recent decision to roll back key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, together with earlier rulings that have expanded presidential power by overturning long-standing precedents, suggests that democratic accountability will deteriorate further.
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The decline in state capacity is even more striking. Beginning at 80 in 2000, America’s score fell to 67 by 2019 before rising to 74 in 2023, still well below many advanced democracies in Western Europe. That decline largely reflects years of underinvestment in core government functions which steadily weakened the authorities’ ability to coordinate policy and deliver public services.
Early evidence suggests that the deterioration has accelerated under Trump’s second administration. Most notably, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), initially led by Elon Musk, slashed funding for public health and scientific research and rolled back numerous environmental rules. At the same time, Trump has systematically dismantled institutional constraints on executive power, securing virtual immunity from the Internal Revenue Service for himself, his family, and the Trump Organization.
As in many other countries, America’s public-goods score proved more resilient, rising from 87 to 90. One reason is that the private sector plays a much larger role in providing health care, education, and other services than it does in most other advanced democracies, making their performance less dependent on the federal government. American science also continues to lead the world, despite Trump’s repeated attempts to starve it of federal funding. But that resilience is financed by public debt of about 120% of GDP, a burden that Trump’s tax cuts and deficit spending will almost certainly deepen.
But rich democracies rarely collapse overnight. Their nemesis is complacency, which sustains policy neglect until the damage to institutions becomes impossible to ignore. Although the transformation of the federal government under Trump has been rapid and dramatic, it builds on a long decline in state capacity and democratic accountability that the BGI identified years ago, when it described the US as a “falling star.”
The US is hardly alone. Germany, for example, underinvested in infrastructure during Angela Merkel’s 16-year chancellorship, leaving the country ill-prepared for the geopolitical and economic shocks of the pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and intensifying competition from China’s manufacturing sector. The United Kingdom, meanwhile, is paying the price for years of austerity, widening regional inequalities, and Brexit. Although each country’s circumstances are distinct, the underlying pattern is strikingly similar: complacency and policy neglect erode governance long before a crisis forces a reckoning.
The New Geography of Governance
The absence of a global democratic or authoritarian wave does not mean governance has stood still. The four governance worlds may be remarkably sticky, but they are not frozen.
To be sure, the consolidated democratic world has proved extraordinarily difficult to enter. As Jamaica’s experience shows, entry requires bold institutional reforms and painstaking efforts to restore fiscal stability. At the other end of the spectrum, no country has slipped into the low-capacity developing cluster, suggesting that falling to the bottom of the governance hierarchy is almost as rare as rising to the top.
Most transitions occurred between the capacity-constrained and the authoritarian and hybrid clusters. Between 2000 and 2023, six countries—El Salvador, Iran, Nicaragua, Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela—crossed from the former to the latter, while four moved in the opposite direction: Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, and Tunisia.
These two groups are home to much of the world’s population. Capacity-constrained countries like Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Africa vary widely in terms of history, institutions, and development trajectories, but they face the same structural constraint: they lack the state capacity needed to translate relatively high levels of democratic accountability into effective governance. As a result, their citizens have a lower quality of life than their institutions would be expected to deliver.
When democratic governments consistently fail to improve people’s lives, authoritarianism becomes more appealing. Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela are prime examples: each entered the 21st century with meaningful, if imperfect, democratic accountability before gradually abandoning it.
But that authoritarian bargain has largely failed. Capacity-constrained countries that shifted into the authoritarian and hybrid group achieved only modest improvements in quality of life while sacrificing democratic accountability and, over time, state capacity itself.
The middle of the governance spectrum is also where democratic self-correction is most likely. Brazil’s recent political history helps explain why. The country entered the 2010s with a relatively strong democratic-accountability score of 92, up from 88 in 2000. But the Operation Car Wash corruption scandal shattered public trust and propelled the far-right Jair Bolsonaro to victory in the 2018 presidential election.
Bolsonaro’s presidency dealt a severe blow to Brazilian governance. Democratic accountability fell sharply, with the country’s score dropping to 77 by 2019 as checks and balances came under strain. Environmental standards were also rolled back, driving the environmental public-goods score down to 51 in 2020.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s return to office in 2023 reversed both trends. Democratic accountability recovered to 84, and the environmental public-goods score reached new highs. While Brazil remains in the capacity-constrained world, its experience shows that democratic decline is not a one-way street. Populations are not always willing to accept a slide toward authoritarianism. When the authoritarian bargain fails to deliver, they can choose to restore accountability and move back toward the consolidated democratic world.
The BGI offers another reason for cautious optimism: a handful of “balanced governance performers” (BGPs) improved simultaneously on all three measures represented by the Governance Triangle. This group includes three capacity-constrained states (Armenia, Moldova, and Malaysia) and three low-capacity developing states (The Gambia, Angola, and Sierra Leone).
What sets these six countries apart is not the extent of their gains but the order in which they occurred. Among the capacity-constrained BGPs, democratic accountability increased by 11–16 points between 2000 and 2023, and state capacity rose by 11–17 points. Public-goods provision lagged behind, increasing by just 4–7 points.
Although they started below the average of their respective clusters, these balanced performers were able to break away from their peers, especially after 2015. They did so by strengthening democratic accountability and state capacity first, building the institutional foundations for lasting improvements in quality of life.
Two Roads to Political Renewal
The BGI’s most important insight is that countries tend to improve their governance in one of two ways. The first is the “grand bargain”: a moment of political rupture in which threatened elites surrender their monopoly on power in exchange for a stake in a new order.
Armenia’s 2018 Velvet Revolution is the clearest example. Its democratic-accountability score, which stood at 53 as recently as 2015, rose to 80 by 2020. The Gambia’s 2016 democratic transition followed a similar pattern, with most of its 35-point increase in democratic accountability occurring after the ouster of former President Yahya Jammeh. The late Nobel laureate economist Douglass North and his co-authors identified this dynamic as one of the “doorstep conditions” for an open political order.
The second route to improved governance is incrementalism, embodied by the gradual reform efforts of countries like Jamaica and Moldova, where progress on one front creates the political capital to tackle the next. Albert Hirschman described this as the logic of “linkages” and “possibilism.”
External institutional anchors, such as the EU’s accession process, can reinforce this process. In either case, durable progress depends less on a single election than on years of often unglamorous institution-building.
The two paths differ in form but seek the same balance between state capacity and democratic accountability—the “narrow corridor” described by the Nobel laureates Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. Good governance exists between despotism and disorder. It requires both a state capable of governing and a society strong enough to hold it accountable. As the BGI shows, countries move into (and along) that corridor through grand bargains or incremental reform. They can also fall out of it.
Recent developments in Budapest and Beijing have brought both paths into sharp relief. Hungary’s democratic renewal suggests that even severely weakened accountability mechanisms can be revitalized when citizens demand stronger checks on executive power.
The Trump-Xi summit—and America’s willingness to accommodate authoritarian regimes like Russia and the Gulf countries—highlights the enduring appeal of the autocratic model. Although the governance performance of authoritarian regimes varies widely, some have delivered rapid gains in quality of life, at least for a time.
The future of governance is therefore unlikely to be shaped by a wave of democratic resurgence, an authoritarian triumph, or a single geopolitical turning point on the scale of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The four governance worlds identified by the BGI have proved remarkably durable, and the gaps between them are more likely to widen than to narrow as the challenges of the 21st century intensify.
Moreover, the political conditions that make such progress possible are not evenly distributed. Nor are the economic, geopolitical, and environmental pressures that governments around the world must confront. But the BGI makes clear that progress remains possible in almost every setting, and Brazil and Hungary remind us that institutional decline need not be permanent.
What is certain is that the decisive political struggles of the coming century will not be decided by dramatic geopolitical breakthroughs. Instead, they will be won or lost through the incremental choices that determine whether countries strengthen democratic accountability and state capacity or succumb to institutional decay and autocratic temptation.
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Helmut K. Anheier
Helmut K. Anheier
Writing for PS since 2017
41 commentaries
Helmut K. Anheier, Professor of Sociology at the Hertie School in Berlin, is Adjunct Professor of Public Policy and Social Welfare at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs.
Edward L. Knudsen
Edward L. Knudsen
Writing for PS since 2021
3 commentaries
Edward L. Knudsen is a research associate at the Hertie School in Berlin.
Joseph C. Saraceno
Joseph C. Saraceno
Writing for PS since 2024
2 commentaries
Joseph C. Saraceno is a project manager and Lead Data Scientist at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs.
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