Autocracy Rising in the United States

The V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) Institute just released their Democracy Report 2020 and the picture isn’t pretty for the USA. We’re still considered an electoral democracy, the highest category, but are falling fast. Below are the charts showing the data for countries around the world.

We’re in red because our scores have declined by a statistically significant amount. You can see the the confidence intervals around last year’s score (in grey) and this year’s score (in red) do not overlap. V-Dem uses experts in each country to evaluate levels of liberal democracy but then uses a variety of methods to adjust for factors like different standards across countries to assure that the measurements are comparable.

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