A Shocking Third Report Gives U.S. Democracy Another Terrible Score

Freedom House’s verdict was bad. V-Dem’s was worse. And today, Bright Line Watch’s is also dire. But we can still turn it around.

The United States is in a period with a “persistence of diminished democracy,” according to a report that will be released on Tuesday. It’s the third study released in the last week that concludes that American democracy is eroding under President Trump. Collectively, these studies show definitively that those of us warning of Trump’s authoritarianism aren’t just crazy liberal partisans. Experts armed with data and cross-country comparisons are universally declaring that the United States is becoming less democratic and at a rate much faster than other nations around the world.

The only good news from these studies is that they point to clear steps to fighting authoritarianism that have worked around the world and might here, as well: judicial rulings, mass protests, and eventually, elections.

A group of around 600 American political scientists on average rank the state of U.S. democracy at 57 on a 0-100 scale, according to the just-released report from Bright Line Watch, a research consortium that polls scholars every few months. That is a huge drop from the 67 that experts gave the United States in December 2024, when Joe Biden was still president. “Expert ratings of U.S democracy have largely stabilized at lower levels than any period since our data began in 2017,” Bright Line writes in an understated tone in the report. Ratings hovered between 60 and 70 during Trump’s first term and Biden’s four years.

A cross-national comparison reinforced the report’s alarming message. The experts rated Israel’s democracy at 49 and Mexico’s at 60, somewhat similar to the United States. But other countries have much more robust democracies right now, such as Great Britain (83) and Canada (88), the nations that the United States usually compares itself to.

Bright Line asked the scholars to assess if various events in Trump’s second term constituted a “threat” to democracy. Nearly all of the scholars agreed on a few key developments: Trump directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute his political enemies; FBI director Kash Patel shutting down his agency’s public corruption unit; Trump pardoning allies involved in the January 6, 2021, insurrection. They listed dozens of other actions, of course, since Trump........

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