Governance Capture Risk Index
The Governance Capture Risk Index estimates the degree to which a country’s institutions — its regulatory system, its political process, its information environment, and its formal safeguards against undue influence — are vulnerable to capture by concentrated economic or political interests.
Higher score = higher risk Lower score = stronger resistance
This is a risk index built entirely from real, independently published data. No figures are estimated, interpolated, or fabricated by Blomstra. Every score traces back to a named public institution’s own published statistics.
The Four Pillars
Each pillar captures a distinct vector of capture risk. Together they answer a question no single metric can: not just how democratic a country is, but how robust its institutions are against private capture.
⚙️ Adaptive coverage: If a country is missing one pillar, the remaining three are reweighted so their weights still sum to 100% — the missing pillar’s absence does not silently count against the country as a zero. If two or more pillars are missing, the country is excluded entirely, flagged as having insufficient data.
Data Sources
All data is sourced from internationally recognised institutions with open APIs and transparent methodologies — the same institutional standard used across every Blomstra index.
| Pillar | Source | Indicator(s) | Coverage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Regulatory Capture | World Bank WGI | GOV_WGI_RQ.SC (Regulatory Quality), GOV_WGI_CC.SC (Control of Corruption) |
~190 countries |
| Political Capture | V-Dem / Our World in Data | political-corruption-index |
~180 countries |
| Information Environment | V-Dem / Our World in Data | freedom-of-expression-index + Media Corruption Score (averaged) |
~180 countries |
| Public Integrity Safeguards | OECD | 9 sub-measures across 6 topics (lobbying, revolving door, consultation, evaluation, whistleblower protection, risk management) | ~40 countries (OECD members + partners) |
🔍 Auditability: Every data point traces back to a verifiable public source. We do not use proprietary panels, paid consumer datasets, or black-box estimates.
How the Score Is Built
Step 1: Pillar-level risk scores
Each pillar produces a 0–100 risk score, oriented so that higher always means higher capture risk. This is done by inverting “good” indicators (where higher = better governance) and rescaling all sources to a common 0–100 axis.
Step 2: Composite aggregation
The four pillar risk scores are combined using a weighted average. The default weight is 25% per pillar, editable via the admin interface.
Step 3: Missing-pillar handling
- Missing exactly one pillar: The remaining three weights are renormalized to sum to 100%. The country is still scored, with its coverage count displayed.
- Missing two or more pillars: The country is excluded entirely, flagged as
INSUFFICIENT_DATA. - Why this matters: Since Pillar 4 (OECD Safeguards) covers only ~40 countries, most scores are built on three pillars. This is displayed transparently rather than concealed.
📊 Example: A non-OECD country with data for Pillars 1, 2, and 3 but no Pillar 4 would receive a composite score based on reweighted weights of 33.3% each for the three available pillars. The country is still ranked, but with a clear “3 of 4 pillars” coverage flag.
Coverage & Transparency
Not every country has equal data availability. World Bank and V-Dem data cover the large majority of the world’s countries. OECD’s Public Integrity Indicators, currently the newest and narrowest of the four sources, cover OECD member states plus a small number of formal adherents and key partners.
Every published score is shown alongside how many of the four pillars — and, for the Safeguards pillar specifically, how many of its underlying topics — actually contributed to it. Coverage is never hidden.
What Is Deliberately Not Included
A fifth pillar, covering tax and offshore secrecy enablement, is under active evaluation. It is not yet included because we have not identified a data source for it that meets our standard: real, institutionally published, and retrievable without manual downloads or ad hoc data handling.
We would rather publish four verified pillars than five, with one resting on a compromise.
Update Cadence
The index is rebuilt on a weekly automated schedule, drawing fresh data directly from each source’s own published data service. No manual intervention is required — the pipeline runs unattended, exactly like the Prosperity Index.
📅 190+ countries scored · 4 pillars · updated weekly
Limitations
- The index measures institutional/proxy risk, not direct corporate influence in dollar or transactional terms.
- Pillar 4 covers only ~40 countries, meaning most scores rest on three pillars — this is disclosed but remains a comparability consideration.
- Some underlying measures are de jure (formal legal frameworks) rather than de facto (actual implementation), which can penalize countries with strong uncodified norms.
- The Tax/Offshore dimension is entirely absent pending a resolvable data-access path.