"The scale and speed of autocratization under the Trump administration are unprecedented in modern times. Under Trump's presidency the level of democracy in the USA has fallen back to the same level as in 1965. That was the year the Voting Rights Act was passed, and it was also the year most scholars view as the U.S. finally having become a true democracy."
"The V-Dem Institute, based in Sweden's University of Gothenburg, has been compiling the world's largest dataset on democracy for more than a decade. The work involves thousands of academic experts measuring various attributes of democracy across the world's countries and rolling those measurements up into aggregate indexes that assess how well governments reflect the will of their citizens, protect their individual liberties, and safeguard the integrity of their electoral processes."
"From the 1990s to the dawn of the first Trump administration, the United States typically rated 0.8 or above, good enough to place us in the top 20 countries in the world. But last year our score plummeted to 0.57, knocking us out of the top 50."
The V-Dem Institute's 2026 democracy report documents a dramatic decline in American democracy under the Trump administration. The United States' democracy score has plummeted from 0.8 or above (top 20 globally) to 0.57, dropping out of the top 50 countries. This represents the most rapid democratic decline in modern times, with the nation's democratic level now equivalent to 1965, before the Voting Rights Act solidified American democracy. The V-Dem Institute, based at Sweden's University of Gothenburg, compiles the world's largest democracy dataset using thousands of academic experts measuring attributes like governmental responsiveness, individual liberties, and electoral integrity across nations.
Read at Slate Magazine
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]