Soft Power

An index of perception: a country's ability to obtain through attraction what it cannot obtain through coercion. The score aggregates familiarity, influence and reputation across eight pillars, from education to media.

Brand Finance Global Soft Power Index, 2026 edition, 193 countries. An opinion survey of tens of thousands of respondents: the data measures what the world thinks of a country, not what it is.

This is the only indicator in the atlas whose source is an opinion. A high score reflects an image, sometimes an old one: a country's reputation has decades of inertia.

The concept comes from Joseph Nye, in 1990. Small Northern European countries vastly outperform their economic weight, while several major economies lag far behind: soft power cannot be bought.