Introduction

For most of the past forty years the argument about government was an argument about size. Roll it back or build it up, privatise or nationalise, cut the deficit or spend through it. The eleven contributions collected here, written between October 2025 and January 2026, suggest the argument has moved on. The question they keep returning to is not how large the state should be but whether it can still do what it says it will, and whether anyone believes it.

That question travels. In Portugal, fifty years after the dictatorship, the institutions are secure and the trust is not. In Botswana the diamond revenues that paid for a paternalistic state are running out, and a new government is trying to become something else. In Albania a virtual minister makes global headlines while a third of the population leaves. In Estonia the most digitised administration in Europe finds that efficiency and trust are not the same thing: as Iivi Riivits-Arkonsuo puts it, trust cannot be coded.

It is not a uniform story of decline. Enma Lopez argues from Madrid that the best defence of democracy is to advance the welfare state rather than merely defend it. Aníbal Peluffo describes a Uruguayan social contract a century old, tested but not broken. Eduardo Engel writes from Chile at the moment its democratic record faces its gravest test since Pinochet, and Marlies Murray from Washington, where a country is dismantling the institutions built to solve its problems. Francisco Gaetani sees in Brazil's uncertainty not only a threat but an opening. Grant Duncan watches a state erode like a sandcastle at the other end of the world.

Geoff Mulgan's essay opens the book rather than closing it. He asks what kind of state we want in the years ahead and answers with a repertoire of twelve themes, among them intelligence, strategy, trust, coordination, public finance, experiment and simplicity, held together by an ethos he calls strength without weight. It is the frame the country studies fill in, and reading it first makes the ten that follow easier to hold together.

The series was produced in partnership with the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. The chapters appear as they were published, in the order they appeared, with only the repeated series footer removed.