They've Been Measuring the Health of Democracies for Years. Guess What Their New Report Says About America. [View all]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/03/democracy-trump-russia-putin-dictator-report.html

No paywall link
https://archive.li/zlDMR

Donald Trump and the Republican Party are dismantling American democracy at a record-breaking pace, according to the latest edition of a long-running project tracking the health of democracies across the world.

“The scale and speed of autocratization under the Trump administration are unprecedented in modern times,” write the authors of the V-Dem Institute’s 2026 democracy report. “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.

In the first year of the second Trump administration, democracy in the United States is in free fall.

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