Civix21 measures how well societies actually function — not through political opinion, but through independent, evidence-based frameworks. In a post-truth world, that distinction matters.
Everything we publish is built on the same evidence base — scored, sourced, and open. The commercial layer sits on top of that public foundation.
A country-level scoring model measuring the distance between institutional capacity and public trust. 90 countries. Three tiers. Updated annually.
trustgap.org →England's only structured, repeatable governance scorecard for all 318 local authorities. Statutory data only. Zero estimates. May 2026 baseline.
View all 318 councils →Commissioned analysis built on the public dataset. Country reports, council briefings, regional comparisons, political baseline assessments.
"Across almost every liberal democracy we have scored, institutions perform significantly better than citizens believe they do. That gap — between structural capacity and public trust — is not a communications problem. It is a legitimacy crisis."
Civix21 is built on a simple conviction: civic debate should be grounded in evidence, and the tools to do that can be built and published openly.
Every score comes from independently published statutory or international sources. No estimates. No survey-based adjustments. No methodology that can be tuned to produce a preferred outcome.
How do you measure whether a society is working? Not through political opinion or economic output alone — but through the full relationship between institutions, citizens, and the world they operate in.
The framework layers three independent assessments into a single classification. Each tier is scored separately and can be used independently. Together they produce the most complete picture of civic health available for any country.
The foundation of the framework. Every country receives a Structural Score — measuring what its institutions deliver across eight sub-indicators drawing on 14 primary sources — and a Relational Score measuring how citizens experience those institutions. The Trust Gap is the distance between the two.
Measures the country's strategic position relative to global forces. A Power Score captures economic weight, geopolitical influence, and institutional resilience. An Exposure Score measures vulnerability to external shocks — economic, security, and climate. Net Strategic Position is the balance between the two.
A synthesis classification combining Tiers 1 and 2. Six bands — from High Resilience to Systemically Vulnerable — describe how a country's internal civic health and external strategic position interact. The band is the headline assessment a country receives.
Commissioned reports built on the same independently sourced, formula-driven scores that power the public framework. The interpretation is ours. The underlying numbers are not.
Most policy and political analysis relies on the analyst's judgement and prior assumptions. Civix21 reports start from independently sourced, formula-driven scores that predate the commission and cannot be adjusted to produce a preferred outcome. If a country scores poorly on governance effectiveness, that is what the World Bank's data shows — not what we think. That distinction matters for organisations that need analysis they can publish, cite, or act on.
Each built on the public dataset. Scope, depth, and format adapted to the commission.
A full Tier 1 analysis for a single country — structural and relational scores, Trust Gap calculation, quadrant classification, and sub-indicator narrative. Goes significantly beyond the public scorecard to explain the story behind each number.
Governance analysis for a specific English council. What the scores reveal indicator by indicator, how the council compares to its peer group, and the precise baseline the current administration has inherited.
All councils in a region compared and ranked. Peer group benchmarking. Finance officer and monitoring officer-ready briefings for councils wanting to understand where they stand relative to comparable authorities.
How incoming administrations compare to the governance record they inherited. Reform UK's baseline across 11 councils. Green and Lib Dem gains in context. Trend analysis from October 2027.
Tell us which country, council, region, or question you need answered. We'll confirm what's available and the turnaround. No obligation.
Essays and briefings from the Civix21 framework. Each piece draws on the Trust Gap dataset and is written for a general audience — not academic journals.
Essays 4–6 cover AI and existential legitimacy, the structural case for UBI, and what the Trust Gap means for foreign policy. Publishing on Substack.
We exist because genuinely agnostic, evidence-based civic analysis is rare and valuable — and because the tools to produce it can now be built and published openly.
We are living through a period of acute democratic stress. Trust in institutions is falling across the developed world. Misinformation is displacing evidence in public debate. Policy decisions are contested not on their merits but on the perceived political allegiance of whoever is making them.
Civix21's response to that is not to shout louder. It is to build frameworks that are harder to dismiss — scored against independently published data, with transparent methodology, no political alignment, and no institutional funder with an interest in the outcome.
The Trust Gap framework at trustgap.org and the Local Council Monitor are the first outputs of that approach. Both are published openly. The commissioned reports layer interpretation on top of the same public foundation.
No government funding. No institutional affiliation. No political alignment.
Civix21 is supported by commissioned report revenue and open to partnerships with foundations and research institutions on terms that preserve what makes the work worth supporting: its independence.
If you represent an organisation that values rigorous, non-partisan civic analysis and wants to support its continuation,
90 countries scored across three tiers. 318 English councils on the Local Council Monitor. All public, all free, all open.
Explore trustgap.org →Tell us which country, council, or region you need covered. We'll confirm what's available and the turnaround. All report types are available on request.
If you believe a score is wrong, please include the country or council, the metric, the value you believe is correct, and the source. We investigate all corrections.
Journalists, academics, and researchers are welcome to use the public data freely with attribution. For bespoke research access or press comment, use the form.
Everything on trustgap.org is free to use, cite, and share. You don't need to contact us to access or reference the public framework.