The Periodic Table of States

It may not seem like the best time to publish yet another global ranking of nations. The World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) have recently come under fire for being vague and biased. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset, a Swedish academic project, touts an advanced methodology blending surveys with supercomputers, yet its results clearly indicate a greater interest in de jure liberalism than de facto democratic practice. Objectivity seems impossible—yet we try.

We should strive to improve rankings because they shape how we evaluate states and how states behave. For example, the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report (CGR) series enjoyed decades of success by awakening the competitive spirit among nations seeking to elevate their ranking—knowing full well that investors use the scores in asset allocation.

Today, we have a plethora of indices ranking states according to metrics such as military power, financial wealth, industrial capacity, technological innovation, democracy, economic freedom, sustainability, reputation, and more. But looking at each indicator in isolation doesn’t tell us much about the robustness of the state as a whole. Meaningfully categorizing states requires curating a meta-index of these diverse quantitative and qualitative variables across the strategic, economic, technological, social, and other domains.

To that end, we are pleased to present the first iteration of the Periodic Table of States (PTOS). Just as natural elements are scattered around the planet in varying degrees of abundance or scarcity, their salient characteristics are elegantly captured in the periodic table of elements.

The analogous PTOS has been designed as a meta-index of more than two dozen fundamental metrics grouped into the categories of strength and stateness, with the sum of those scores representing a state’s overall stability.

This methodology is designed to capture the traditional emphasis in international relations on a state’s latent capabilities (strength) stemming from its territorial size, population, military assets, industrial base, and economic weight, as well as the more contemporary concerns of political science with institutional capacity (stateness) as measured by public service efficiency, rule of law, and social development. It also takes advantage of new datasets that capture obviously important but historically neglected factors such as quality of life, food security, and climate resilience.

Scholars tend to generalize about “the state” as if reality could ever match the academic archetype. But there have never been as many states as we have today, and beyond the legal commonalities among them—similarities in form—there is a wide spectrum in function. Strength and stateness alone are useful metrics, but they are also means to an end: stability, which is the composite that results from adding up each country’s strength and stateness scores.

This is empirically appropriate: We should expect states that are both strong and robust to embody a durable stability. It is also normatively neutral: States don’t universally aspire to be more Western or democratic, but every state wants to be more stable.