Democracy Running on 2.4 out of 10

The full numbers

The 2022 National Integrity Assessment introduced an updated framework that includes the Parliamentarians Integrity Index (PII) and an electoral-corruption sub-score. The findings:

• National Integrity Score: 8.01 (“Good”)
• External Integrity (interactions between citizens and government): 8.26 (“Very Good”)
• Internal Integrity (within-civil-service): 8.34 (“Very Good”)
• Parliamentarians Integrity Index: 6.90 (“Satisfactory”) — lowest aggregated category
• Within PII, Electoral Corruption sub-score: 2.40 (“Need Improvement”)
• Within PII, Legislative function score: 6.35 (“Need Improvement”)
• Within PII, Oversight function score: 5.86 (“Need Improvement”) The electoral-corruption score reflects perceptions of payments in cash or kind to gain voter support during elections. The 2.40 score indicates that survey respondents widely perceive such payments to be prevalent during election cycles. 38% of public-hearing participants rated the conduct of elections low on integrity.

Imagine this

A village teacher in Lhuentse, mid-30s, returns home in the week before the National Council election. Her uncle hosts a visit from a candidate’s representative. Tea is served. Conversation moves from harvest to elections. A wrapped package — clothing, alcohol, a sum of cash — is given as a “festival contribution” to the household. The teacher’s uncle, who has hosted village gatherings for years, is not asked to commit anything in return. But the gesture is registered. On polling day, her uncle will remember the gesture. He will mention it to his sons. The household’s collective vote will tilt accordingly. Multiply across hundreds of villages and thousands of households over a 6-week election period. The country’s own integrity assessment puts the prevalence at 2.40 on a 10-point scale — a Need Improvement rating that no other category in the NIA receives. The 2.40 is striking because Bhutan’s democratic transition (2008) was a Royal grant — a gift from the monarch to the people, designed in stages, prepared by years of constitutional drafting and civic education. The expectation was that a top-down, principled democratic launch would produce democratic conduct of higher integrity than older democracies that grew up with corruption baked in. The 2.40 says: it has not.

Where this came from

Bhutanese society remains organised around extended kinship networks, regional loyalties, and the dynamic of personal favours (paradox #43 — 58.89% believe family/friend connections expedite services). Election cycles import these dynamics into the public sphere. Candidates do not, in most cases, need to offer policy platforms to win — they need to be embedded in the village’s kin and favour network.

The “festival contribution” is, in that frame, a continuation of normal village reciprocity rather than a discrete bribe. The ECB (Election Commission of Bhutan) has rules against vote-buying and enforces them where evidence exists. But the dynamic is hard to evidence: there is no contract, no receipt, no quid pro quo on paper.

The 2.40 score is what citizens perceive — not what gets prosecuted.

Why this matters now

Bhutan has had four general elections (2008, 2013, 2018, 2023–24). The system is no longer new. The electoral-integrity score has not improved meaningfully over the four cycles. If anything, observers note that election spending and informal gift-giving has scaled with each cycle.

The democratic transition succeeded constitutionally but is still working its way through cultural norms. The 5.6-point gap between national integrity (8.01) and electoral integrity (2.40) is the largest sub-category gap in the entire NIA. It points to a specific, identifiable feature of the democratic culture that needs deliberate intervention — not in legal text (the laws exist) but in enforcement, in candidate-funding transparency, and in citizen norms.

What it should be

A democratic culture where the electoral-integrity score climbs toward the national average (8+). That requires: real-time public disclosure of candidate spending; sharp limits on cash/kind movement during the campaign period; ECB capacity to investigate not just polling-day conduct but pre-election village-level gift exchanges; and civic education that distinguishes normal village reciprocity from electoral exchange (a hard but necessary cultural distinction).

How others do it

• New Zealand — top of democratic-integrity rankings; public funding of campaigns + tight spending caps + early disclosure
• Finland — campaign-finance reporting in real time; well below 1 case of vote-buying prosecution per cycle nationally
• Estonia — i-Voting platform reduces the polling-day window for cash exchange
• Ghana — emerging democracy with active electoral commission; prosecutes vote-buying cases publicly to set norms
• India — Election Commission seizes hundreds of crores of “election cash” each cycle; the seizures themselves become a statement of intolerance
• Bhutan: laws exist; the village-level dynamic that drives the 2.40 score has not yet been addressed at scale

The question we should be sitting with

The country’s lowest integrity score is also the most important integrity score — the one that determines who writes the laws everyone else has to live by. Why is the gap between our national score (8.01) and our electoral score (2.40) the largest in the assessment, and why have four election cycles not narrowed it?