WÜRZBURG, Germany — What qualities does a well-run country have? A democratic government? Good-paying jobs for its people? Efficient healthcare? It turns out that what many Americans consider the key ingredients to a successful state doesn’t even get the United States into the world’s top 20! According to a new “stateness” index created by researchers in Germany, living in a democracy is optional when it comes to ranking the best states around the world.

“We can see the state in everything that surrounds us, for example in the streets, the courts, the police or the schools,” says Theresa Paola Stawski, a political scientist from the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU).

Stawski adds that the idea of “the state” is more than just the people in charge of the federal government and the states and municipalities within that country. The researcher further explains that a patient quickly receiving a doctor’s appointment when they need an X-ray, children having a large selection of schools to go to, and communities having plenty of electricity day or night are all examples of well-functioning states.

With that in mind, the rankings for 2022 place a somewhat surprising country at the top of the world — Singapore. The small Asian nation of roughly 5.5 million people finished ahead of Australia (2nd), Denmark (3rd), the Netherlands (4th), and Estonia (5th) to round out the top five on the list of 173 countries.

We’re number… 23?

While the researchers still list the United States as a “high functioning state,” America couldn’t break into the top 20, finishing in 23rd place. The United States finished just ahead of the Czech Republic, Austria, and Canada, but way behind other world powers such as Germany (10th), the United Kingdom (13th), and France (20th). Interestingly, the fact that the U.S. has the longest standing democracy does not help its ranking when it comes to being a well-run state.

“Whether a state functions well or not does not always have something to do with democracy,” says Stawski in a university release.

Researchers note that Singapore, for example, is not a democracy. The United Arab Emirates (32nd) also received the designation of a high functioning state.

“The State is an institutionalized social and political order and organization of hierarchical authority that is in exclusive control of the Monopoly of Law, Monopoly of Violence, and Monopoly of Administration throughout a given territory and its inhabitants,” the German team writes on their rankings’ site.

“Stateness as the performance of institutions denotes that a state can insert and uphold the laws enacted by the regime, possesses the means necessary to control both territory and populations and commands a bureaucratic infrastructure to implement and exert territorial sovereignty throughout the state territory.”

‘Stateness’ Index – 2022 Rankings