Germany: Which country has the best government?

Der Spiegel

The Craft of Ruling Which Country Has the Best Government?

By Bernhard Zand

REUTERS

The US House of Representatives: Is democracy still the 'final form of human government?

Of all the governing styles in the world, does one country stand out as more successful than the others? Shaken by the financial and debt crises, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, leaders are being forced to re-examine their ideas of "good governance." In an introduction to a four-part series, SPIEGEL reviews their progress.

The debate raging among politicians and political scientists centers on a term known as "good governance." Five years after the outbreak of the financial and debt crisis, SPIEGEL is considering how good the leaders of four selected countries are at detecting and solving problems in a series of articles.

Using Rio de Janeiro as an example, the first in the series describes how Brazilian governments have managed to invalidate the seemingly irrefutable laws of globalization. The Chinese city of Lanzhou shows the practices that have turned China into a superpower in the second article. A third report from the US pinpoints the weaknesses plaguing the system of "checks and balances" that has been in place for more than 200 years, while the final piece on the exemplary European nation of Denmark explains how governments and their citizens can cooperate.


Read it at Der Spiegel:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/good-governance-series-which-goverment-is-best-a-845170.html