The status of American democracy feels paradoxical: somehow both damaged and well-functioning at the same time.
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On the one hand, the United States has a president who is acting like a dictator: threatening to wipe out an entire civilization, menacing allies with threats to annex their territory, targeting domestic enemies with spurious criminal investigations, and deploying masked armed forces to cities.
On the other hand, his ambitions have been continually frustrated by court rulings, a grassroots protest movement that has turned out millions of Americans on three separate occasions, and an opposition party that’s all but certain to flip at least one house of Congress in November’s elections.
So what do you call this — authoritarianism, democracy, or something in between? In recent weeks, three major studies have tried to answer this question, using rigorous methodologies to provide a quantitative estimate of democratic health in America.
Broadly, the reports’ findings converge on a similar picture: that American democracy has been damaged in President Donald Trump’s first year, perhaps severely, but remains alive and functioning. In fact, it might even be healing.
A close look at the reports’ details, including careful attention to their disagreements and divergences, helps clarify the reasons why that’s true — and maybe even give a little bit of optimism about democracy’s future.
Just how damaged is American democracy?
Studying democratic health is tricky. There isn’t an objective instrument you can use to measure it the way that, say, thermometers can tell you body temperature.
So instead, the three reports rely on surveys. They ask leading experts to respond to detailed questionnaires on different aspects of a country’s politics, and then put the results together to construct a kind of overall assessment.
The first two reports, from the V-Dem Institute and Freedom House, respectively, try to do this not just for the United States but for the whole world: ranking every country in the world on 100-point scales designed to evaluate the nature of their regimes. Developed democracies like Norway or Japan score very highly; outright authoritarian states, like North Korea or Saudi Arabia, are near the bottom.
Editions of each report are released annually, and, for decades, the United States was a top performer in both. But the 2026 edition, whose findings assess changes in the previous calendar year, showed a real decline. Both agree that Trump’s unilateral assertions of executive power, his assault on checks on said powers, and his threats against the political opposition have all damaged the health and quality of American democracy.
Yet the assessment of the scope of that damage is strikingly different.
V-Dem’s Liberal Democracy Index showed a 22-point year-over-year drop, from 79 to 57. This is the largest single-year decline ever recorded for the United States, and is the lowest rating it has held since 1965 (when Jim Crow was formally abolished). The US currently scores 31 points below the top-ranked democracy, Denmark (88), and has fallen below countries like Sri Lanka and Israel.
Freedom House’s Freedom in the World rankings, by contrast, show a decline of just three points: from 84 down to 81. That’s still well below top performer Finland, which scores a perfect 100, but it’s much higher than Sri Lanka and Israel — more in the class of South Korea (83) and Italy (87).
Why the difference? When I spoke with authors of each report, they emphasized that they were each trying to measure subtly different things.
V-Dem is primarily interested in assessing democratic institutions: whether the government functions in a way that can reasonably be described as democratic, and is passing laws that are consistent with democratic values and principles. Freedom House, by contrast, is more focused on the experience of citizens in a country — its rating is less about what the formal rules are and more about how those rules translate to the actual freedoms of the people living there.
Take freedom of speech, a notable area of divergence between the two reports. V-Dem’s data shows a significant American decline in that area, citing Trump administration efforts to punish critical journalists and restrict academic funding on political grounds. Yet Freedom House registered no change to America’s score in either press or academic freedom, as the US remains (in relative global terms) a place with large and independent media outlets and universities.
The third report, from the Bright Line Watch scholarly consortium, adds yet another layer of complexity: how Trump’s impact changed over time.
In raw numerical terms, its expert surveys record a democracy score drop between 2024 and 2025 that’s somewhere in the middle V-Dem and Freedom House estimates (roughly 15 points on a 0–100 scale). Yet unlike the others, Bright Line Watch fields multiple surveys per year. This means that while the others provide one score for the entirety of 2025, Bright Line Watch can track democracy’s health during different periods of the year.
This approach suggested something surprising: that most of America’s democratic decline happened during the early months of 2025.
When Trump took office, experts rated US democracy as about a 70 — where it had been for most of the first Trump administration and the Biden years. The score plummeted in the early months of 2025, reaching a nadir of 53 in April 2025. The outlook has since stabilized and even improved: The most recent report, published in late March, has American democracy rated at about a 57. That’s still alarming, but at least it’s moving in the right direction.
Elections, my dear boy — elections
Taken together, these reports give us a helpful lens for understanding the events of the past year: what was really dangerous, how much damage it did, and what matters going forward.
The first key point is that the early months of 2025 were an exceptionally perilous time for American democracy. The blitz of executive orders, and the DOGE demolition of congressionally authorized agencies like USAID, represented a massive and unprecedented expansion of executive authority.
Both V-Dem and Freedom House cite executive power grabs, and congressional inability to override them, as a major reason for America’s democratic decline. In fact, V-Dem’s data shows that the metric designed to assess this, called “legislative constraints,” was “the worst affected aspect of democracy” in 2025. Bright Line Watch, for its part, registered the vast bulk of its decline during this period.
But the pace of power grabs proved unsustainable. DOGE, the principal agent of much of the most aggressive activity, collapsed under the combined weight of Elon Musk’s incompetence and a targeted protest campaign. While Trump has continued to attempt to govern unilaterally since, the early months’ assault on democratic constraints on power has slowed down significantly.
This points to a second conclusion, one supported both by the V-Dem/Freedom House and the Bright Line Watch timing finding: that Trump has had difficulty converting attacks on democracy into successful repression.
There is no doubt, as V-Dem’s data shows, that Trump has continued a multi-pronged attack on democracy. In the past year, we’ve seen the administration attempt to bully ABC into censoring Jimmy Kimmel, impose tariffs based on risible claims of an emergency, and deploy masked and unaccountable agents to the streets of American cities.
Yet there’s also a reason why these didn’t translate into a similar drop in Freedom House scores, with their focus on outcomes for citizens, or further drops in Bright Line Watch scores: Much of what they’ve attempted has been repulsed. Kimmel was reinstated, the Supreme Court overturned the emergency tariff power, and the White House pulled back its immigration operation in Minneapolis.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, America still looks good on the most significant test of a democracy’s health: its elections.
The essence of democracy is power alternation determined by free and fair elections: So long as the opposition can compete and win without undue burdens, democracy remains alive. In its report, Bright Line Watch singled out the results of last fall’s elections as a key reason for US improvement over the early 2025 nadir.
“The defeats Republicans faced at the polls in off-year elections in 2025…showed that the playing field had not been tilted against the opposition and that free and fair elections were still possible,” the authors write.
When I spoke with Marina Nord, a V-Dem researcher, she said that high-quality elections created a kind of democratic baseline for the United States. It’s almost impossible for drops on other V-Dem metrics, even ones as severe as they recorded in the past year, to take America out of the realm of democracy altogether as long as experts continue to rate its elections highly.
Now, no one should be complacent here. What’s happened in the past year is deeply damaging to democracy’s good function, and the Trump administration is constantly trying to push the frontiers of its power and authority.
That includes several actions that appear like clear preludes to a campaign against the midterm election. The Trump administration sent the FBI to seize data on the 2020 election from a government office in Georgia, convinced 10 states to turn over voter roll data, spearheaded a round of mid-cycle gerrymandering, and announced an intent to federalize election administration as they see fit.
So far, none of these efforts have amounted to a durable GOP advantage. All but the gerrymandering push are either hypothetical or haphazard, and Democrats have successfully countered Trump’s partisan redistricting with their own in blue states. In general, the legal delegation of election administration to the states has proven an effective bulwark against federal tampering with the vote.
So while the fight over the midterms is hardly over, the current state of affairs gives some cause for small-d democratic optimism. As do the events of the past year.