Civix21 is an independent initiative. No government funding. No institutional affiliation. No political alignment. Just a conviction that civic debate should be grounded in evidence — and that the tools to do that can 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 credibility of whoever is making them.
Civix21 exists as a response to that condition. Its central argument is simple: if you want to improve how societies function, you have to start by measuring how they actually function — rigorously, transparently, and in a way that anyone can interrogate.
That means distinguishing between what institutions are capable of doing and what citizens experience in practice. It means identifying where trust has broken down and why. It means finding the countries and councils that are doing things better — and asking what others can learn from them.
And it means doing all of this in a way that is methodologically honest: clear about sources, explicit about assumptions, open about limitations, and updated as new data arrives.
"In a post-truth world, evidence-based civic measurement is not a neutral act. It is an argument — that facts matter, that institutions can be assessed, and that better is possible."Civix21 — founding principles
A three-tier model for assessing national civic health — from institutional trust and legitimacy, through strategic position, to overall societal resilience. The methodology is published openly and draws on 15 authoritative global datasets.
Read the methodologyThe live data layer. 90 countries scored on Tier 1 trust and institutional health. Structural scores, relational scores, Trust Gap calculations, and quadrant classifications — all published and updated annually on trustgap.org.
About TrustgapAn England-specific performance framework for local authorities across all council levels — district, borough, county, unitary, combined authority. Designed to track change over time, not just produce a single-point ranking.
About the Council MonitorCivix21 has no government funding, no party-political affiliation, and no institutional sponsors with an interest in the outcomes. Independence is not a brand value — it is a structural requirement for the work to mean anything.
Every score, every weighting, every adjustment rule is documented and published. We want people to be able to check our working, challenge our assumptions, and identify where they think we've got it wrong. That kind of scrutiny makes the framework better.
We do not use aggregated indices as proxies for other aggregated indices. Every indicator in the framework draws directly from its primary data source — World Bank, V-Dem, Edelman, Reuters, SIPRI, and others. The methodology documents exactly where each number comes from.
Scores run on a fixed 0–100 benchmark. A country's score is not determined by where it sits relative to others — it is determined by where it sits against a fixed standard. This makes longitudinal tracking meaningful: a score of 72 in 2024 means the same thing as a score of 72 in 2020.
Measurement is not truth. Any framework of this kind involves choices — what to include, how to weight, how to handle missing data. We document those choices explicitly and flag where the framework has blind spots, particularly in authoritarian contexts where state suppression affects data reliability.
Civix21 grew out of a straightforward frustration: public debate about how well countries are governed tends to be dominated either by abstract ideological argument or by single-metric indices that flatten genuinely complex realities.
GDP per capita tells you one thing. A democracy index tells you another. A corruption ranking tells you a third. None of them tells you what the relationship between those things actually is — or what happens when a country scores well on institutional capacity but its citizens have stopped believing in those institutions.
The framework started as an attempt to answer that specific question — and the answer, when we first scored ten countries, was striking enough to warrant scaling it up. The pattern we found — that virtually every liberal democracy is sitting in the Efficient But Distant quadrant, with a significant Trust Gap — is now confirmed across 90 countries.
The Local Council Monitor emerged from the same logic applied at a sub-national level: if we can measure how well national institutions are functioning, we should be able to do the same for local government — where most people's day-to-day experience of public services actually happens.
Civix21 is the umbrella that holds this work together — the framework, the datasets, and the thought leadership that tries to turn the numbers into something that influences how people think about civic health, institutional reform, and democratic resilience.
Civix21 is not a policy advocacy organisation. It does not campaign for specific politicians, parties, or policy programmes. Its findings have implications for policy — and we are willing to say so clearly — but the framework itself is not in the business of telling governments what to do.
Civix21 is not an academic institution. The work is methodologically rigorous and draws on peer-reviewed primary datasets, but it is not peer-reviewed in the academic sense. It is independent analysis, published openly, subject to public scrutiny.
Civix21 is not a comprehensive measure of social wellbeing. The framework focuses specifically on institutional health, civic trust, and strategic resilience. It does not claim to capture everything that matters about a society — only the dimensions it explicitly measures.
What it does claim is that those dimensions matter enormously — and that the Trust Gap between institutional performance and citizen experience is one of the most important and underexamined features of democratic life in the 21st century.
We welcome questions about the methodology, suggestions for improvement, and requests to discuss the findings. We are also open to conversations with researchers, journalists, and policy professionals working on related questions.
The full dataset is published openly at trustgap.org. Local council data is at localcouncilmonitor.trustgap.org.