Democratic Backsliding Reaches Western Democracies, with U.S. Decline “Unprecedented”
"Democratic backsliding is now happening in well-established democracies. Democracy in the USA is deteriorating at unprecedented speed, and media and journalists are increasingly targeted across the world."
File under “oh, fun”, from the V-Dem Project at the University of Gothenburg:
“The U.S. democracy is currently in a much faster deterioration process than any other democracy in modern times. Within only one year, the USA’s score on the V-Dem Liberal Democracy index has declined by 24 percent, while its world rank dropped from 20th to 51st place out of 179 nations.”
The report compares the USA’s rate of decline to Hungary, Serbia, India, Russia, and Türkiye, and shows that what took Orbán four years and Modi a decade, the current administration accomplished in one. Only six countries have registered larger one-year drops on the LDI since 2000, and five of those were military coups.
As the report points out, the midterms will be a litmus test. Will it be a free and fair election — or something else? Time will tell. Election-specific indicators in the report are only reassessed in election years, so the 2025 LDI score is actually held up by the quality of the 2024 elections. If the 2026 elections are compromised, our score will plummet.
And it’s not just us.
“Nearly a quarter of the world’s nations are going through democratic backsliding, or autocratization, in 2025, and six out of the ten new autocratizing countries identified in the 2026 Democracy Report are in Europe and North America. Among them are large and influential countries like Italy, the United Kingdom, and the USA, according to the report authored by a team led by Professor Staffan I Lindberg at the V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg.”
The UK doesn’t get away scot-free. It’s listed as a new autocratizer this year, driven primarily by declines in freedom of expression and media freedom. But as sobering as that fact is, the fall is nowhere near as fast or precipitous as the United States.
It’s worth saying that this is the University of Gothenburg, an international university collaborating with other institutions, and not some random organization or mouthpiece. It should be taken seriously, and it's particularly the people who believe American ideals are infallible that need to wake up.
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