The World’s Best Governments
January 8, 2011 8 Comments
Politics might be little more than background noise to most Canadians, but you might be surprised to learn that Canada is one of the world’s 10 best-governed jurisdictions. So suggest numbers published online by the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators Project.
Since 1996, the Worldwide Governance Indicators Project, headed by Daniel Kaufmann of the Brookings Institution, Aart Kraay of the World Bank Development Economics Research Group and Massimo Mastruzzi of World Bank Institute, have been tracking the performance of the world’s countries and autonomous regions in six areas of performance: giving citizens a voice in how the place is run and in being accountable to them, political stability, overall government effectiveness, quality of regulation, rule of law and control of corruption.
In each of these six areas, the Project assigns each country or autonomous region a score of up to 100. As the following table of the world’s 25 best-governed nations shows, Canada ranked 10th overall as of the Project’s latest update on the state of the world’s governments, released in 2009. Nordic countries — Finland, Denmark and Sweden — dominated the top three spots while the rest of the top 10 spots were dominated by other smaller northern European countries, aside from New Zealand in fifth place.
World's 25 best governments, 2009 (Click to enlarge)
For simplicity, numerical scores have been converted into letter grades as follows:
- A+ (97-100)
- A (93-96)
- A- (90-92)
- B+ (87-89)
- B (83-86)
- B- (80-82)
- C+ (77-79)
- C (73-76)
- C- (70-72)
- D+ (67-69)
- D (63-66)
- D- (60-62)
- F (below 60)
Canada’s only significant shortcoming was in government stability, though even here we finished with a respectable 85 out of 100, still good enough for a ‘B’ grade.
Britain — on whose model of government Canada’s is based — also faced shortcomings on political stability, scoring only 55 out of 100, earning it an ‘F’ in this regard and preventing it from enjoying a higher rank given its excellent scores in other areas.
The United States was also held back by a poor score on political stability (59 out of 100, which earned it an ‘F’), causing it to fall just short of the Top 25 with a 28th place finish despite earning more respectable Bs in most other aspects of government and one A-minus on rule of law.
The worst-governed countries included Somalia, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Congo and Zimbabwe, all of which earned average scores of less than 5 out of 100.
Of the 213 jurisdictions measured, only the top eight percent — home to a mere three percent of the world’s population — merited an overall grade of A- or better. Sixty-two percent of jurisdictions earned a failing grade overall, and 43 percent of places failed in all six areas measured.
Lesson learned: If you’re lucky enough to live in Canada, you’ve got it pretty good. But if you ever want advice on how to run a really good government, call Finland.
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Am I to take the meaning that they believe majority governments makes for better governments?
As for Finland, they are about to have an election where the True Finns could make gains and they have a reputation for being xenophobic and anti-Europe.
The findings seem to suggest the contrary: the top of the list is dominated by countries with legislatures elected in whole or in part by proportional representation at fixed election dates. It’s easy to see how this can be beneficial to governance: the assumption that two or more parties will have to share power keeps the ideologues in check. So does the minimal effect of a two- or three-percentage point shift in the vote in those countries compared to Canada, the U.S. or Britain, where even small across-the-board shifts can mean big differences in seat counts, thus empowering the ideological base vote. A fixed election date can also reduce tensions by removing the threat of an early election as an intimidation tactic.
The True Finns, distasteful as they are, can be contained. Their latest polling numbers would give them about 15 percent of the vote, which might make them a coalition partner but still only give them by one estimate only about 20 out of 200 seats, given the way their support is spread out among Finland’s 16 electoral districts. Election dates are fixed — the third Sunday in March of every fourth year — so they cannot use the threat of an early election as leverage.
I wonder if removing confidence votes, fixed elections and proportional representation would actually make things more stable. It is possible given our diversified population that it would make thing more unstable.
The very quick rise in the True Finns popularity seems to indicate they will have a greater influence than just how many votes they win in this election. Most certainly it will affect the relationship with Europe, immigration and most likely the stability that saw them at the top of the world chart.
I doubt that we’ll see much movement toward electoral reform in Canada over the next 10 years unless there is a government so polarizing that electoral reform becomes a tool for punishing that government. Right now, the political mood in Canada can be best described as “meh” — people care more about hockey, reality TV and mundane local issues than they do about what the smarter President Bush called “that vision thing”.
That indifference to the parties and to how governments are elected will likely increase over the next decade as the ’80s and ’90s generation — the Me Generation on steroids, who are more interested in joining a customized mix of interest groups instead of a package-deal political party, if they’re interested in politics at all — make up a larger percentage of the voting age population.
As for Finland, we can only wait and see. However, Switzerland, Austria and Denmark have had good success at minimizing the impact of populist outbursts. It probably helps that most individual European countries aren’t large enough to support entire industries dedicated to ideology and campaign battles as is the case in U.S., and that strict broadcast regulations have prevented cable/satellite television and talk radio from becoming the open sewers that they’ve become in North America.
It doesn’t really speak so much about Canada as speak poorly of most countries of the world.
You’re right, it does speak poorly of how much of the world is run.
What about the United States…?
@ Latifa: The U.S. ranked #28