Notes from the Upside Down XIV: The Tide is Turning--Democracy is on the Retreat, Authoritarianism Rising

That is, according to the Bertelsmann Stiftung's Transformation Index which, conveniently, omits 'the West' from its database and engages in name-calling, which passes for 'poli-sci' these days

Apr 08, 2022

Editorial note: I’m off(line) this weekend—a few weeks ago, we bought a farm in the rural hinterlands and today we shall travel to our new abode, take over the keys, and start working. I suppose that we’ll be back by Tuesday, which indicates that posting will probably very limited until then.

If you haven’t done so, please tell the EU Commission to stop pre-emptively extending their misguided Covid Passport policies for another year. You can do so directly via their website, and it doesn’t matter if you’re an EU/EAA citizen or not; you may comment anonymously or in your name. The feedback period is still open until 8 April 2022 (midnight Brussels time).

If you wish to figure out why, please refer to my dedicated post. If you’d like to do so, but you lack ‘inspiration’, you may wish to check out my own post (here, and feel free to ‘plagiarise’)—or browse the comments at the EU Commission’s website.

Finally, if you know someone who may be convinced to similarly comment, please share the EU Commission’s feedback form. Thank you, sincerely.

And now, for something not altogether completely different.

One of my readers from Austria (who posts under the screen name ‘Yakari’) was kind enough to drop me an email with the following information:

Header: Austria Relegated to Electoral Democracy
Caption: illustration: documents in the parliamentary committee investigating possible corruption among the [conservative
The Democracy Report sees a deterioration in transparency—the same jump downwards is made by Ghana, Portugal and Trinidad and Tobago.

I get the impression of—hurt feelings.

At the bottom of that very brief piece, there are two links: one to the ‘basis’ of that piece by Die Presse (Vienna’s conservative-leaning upper middle-class paper, with Der Standard being its centre-liberal/left-ish equivalent), which appeared in the magazine profil, and the other a link to the alleged source.

Why would I say ‘alleged’ source?

Well, the link used by Die Presse leads to a different website, which is…

The Bertelsmann Stiftung Did it Again

The Bertelsmann Stiftung’s ‘Democracy Report’, which allows you to download their report. Written by Hauke Hartmann and Peter Thiery, that piece is entitled ‘Resilience wearing thin’, and ‘this global trend report analyzes the results of the Bertelsmann Stiftung’s Transformation Index BTI 2022 in the review period from February 1, 2019, to January 31, 2021’.

First, a bit about the authors (p. 3 in that above-cited report):

Hauke Hartmann is Senior Expert at the Bertelsmann Stiftung and heads the Transformation Index BTI. Peter Thiery is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Political Science, Heidelberg University.

Whatever else may be said is—did Mr. Hartmann (a fellow historian by training, no less, as his official web profile indicates) begin his career as a ‘junior expert’? I digress, keep in mind that Mr. Hartmann obtained a Ph.D. in History from the Free University of Berlin (2003) and lists as his linguistic competence—‘English’ (only), even though he also has a degree in Latin American Studies from SUNY Albany (for which neither Spanish or Portuguese appear to be required). His co-author, Peter Thiery, is a political scientist with comparable credentials (profile here) who also studies, among other things, Latin America—he’s listed at least one publication in Spanish, so, that’s more than Mr. Hartmann. Curiously enough, Mr. Thiery has been a ‘Research Fellow’ at the Bertelsmann Stiftung since 2014.

So, while it’s quite expectable what, and how, these two gentlemen write about, here’s how their ‘findings’ may be summarised (by the front page of their flagship publication):

Note that much like other institutions (e.g., Transparency International comes to my mind), it’s a vainglorious effort at finger-pointing. Note, further, that the Bertelsmann Stiftung doesn’t even pretend, or pay lip-service, to impartiality: the ‘international community’—EUrope, North America, and select ‘Western’ friends and allies are excluded from the ‘analysis’ a priori. I’m quite sure this isn’t how ‘political science’ is done, because if you remove the comparison, what is left…appears to be finger-pointing.

Let’s not get bogged down by such details, though, and let’s look at their institutional partners and funders, shall we, before we even think about reading their ‘prose’?

Little surprisingly, their institutional partners include the German Development Ministry, Deutsche Welle, the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, the Gulf Research Center, Transparency International, the World Bank Institute, among others.

Nuff said, I suppose.

That’s it for now—stay tuned for the next instalment.