Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World's Sole Superpower by Michael Beckley

Author:Michael Beckley [Beckley, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781501724787
Google: XSRItAEACAAJ
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2018-11-15T23:49:00.628812+00:00

Figure 5.4. Combined defense spending of each great power’s neighbors (constant 2015 $).

Note: Totals only include countries bordering each great power’s homeland (e.g., the lower forty-eight states for the United States), not outlying territories.

Source: SIPRI 2017a.

INSTITUTIONS

The most widely used measures of government capacity and accountability are the World Bank’s six Worldwide Governance Indicators, which aggregate data from more than thirty international institutions, media outlets, think tanks, survey institutes, and private firms.192 Three of these indicators measure aspects of state capacity: government effectiveness, regulatory quality, and political stability and the absence of violence. The other three indicators measure accountability: voice and accountability, rule of law, and control of corruption. Below, I use these indicators to provide a first look at each great power’s institutions. Then I supplement the indicators with data from country-specific studies. The results suggest that the United States has much more capable and accountable institutions than Russia, China, or India; slightly more capable and accountable institutions than France; and slightly less capable and accountable institutions than Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Capacity. The United States scores slightly lower in terms of state capacity than Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom (figure 5.5) mainly because it has a smaller and more divided state. The U.S. system has more “veto points” (aka checks and balances spread across the courts, Congress, presidency, and the states) than the parliamentary systems common in other developed democracies;193 and as a percentage of GDP, the United States has the third lowest levels of government spending and tax revenues among the thirty-four countries in the OECD. American fiscal capacity is only 80 percent that of Japan, 75 percent that of the United Kingdom, 67 percent that of Germany, and half that of Denmark, which tops the World Bank’s state capacity rankings.194

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