Is the United States a democracy, an autocracy, or some hybrid? For decades, several major organizations have been studying the strength of democracy in the U.S. and elsewhere. Three of these assessors are Freedom House (a highly bipartisan American organization), the Economist Magazine’s “Intelligence Unit” (Britain), and V-Dem (headquartered in Sweden with global partners such as the Kellogg Institute at Notre Dame University). Annually, these assessors evaluate all nations and give each a democracy score. The 2026 scores will be the first to include 2025 events.
All democracy assessors focus on actual events and practices rather than on declarations such as ones contained in constitutions and other laws. So, for example, all assessors ignore that Vladimir Putin calls Russia a “democracy” or that Russia’s Constitution looks very much like the U.S. Constitution (three independent branches, elections, a comparable bill of rights). As a result, all give Russia a low democracy score and categorize it as an autocracy.
All three assessors named above have given the U.S. lower scores since Trump 1.0. For the past decade, V-Dem has actually considered America a hybrid nation rather than a full democracy.
Much can be learned about democracy by looking at the scoring criteria used by assessors and at the types of evidence they depend upon in their assessments. As expected, they all look at developments that directly affect the institutions of democracy. For example, they see gerrymandering and burgeoning campaign contributions as diluting voting equality; they see congressional gridlock as seriously diluting our basic check-and-balance system; and they see January 6 and repetition of the disproven Big Lie as undermining the peaceful transfer of power, a cornerstone of democracy.
But the assessors see something else that I want to emphasize. They see a nation’s culture and values as a vital element of democracy. That is, they see democratic institutions sitting on a platform of societal values. Erode that base and you weaken democracy; erode it enough and you kill democracy.
So, in their assessments and scoring, assessors give considerable weight to societal forces that support or undermine values such as national unity, equality (voting equality as well as equal economic opportunity and shared prosperity), honesty, mutual respect, the rule of law, and equity (fundamental fairness).
Many of us have been upset, perhaps throughout our entire lives, with attacks on values such as these. We have seen them as violating our religious beliefs or human rights or basic morality. But we haven’t recognized them as threats to democracy because American democracy has seemed so permanent to us. We simply couldn’t imagine it ending.
So, for example, many of us have been bothered by the growth of major supremacies — white, Christian, straight, male — particularly since the late 1970s when they emerged as the base of the New Right. What we didn’t appreciate until recently was that these supremacies don’t just offend our moral beliefs, they erode democracy. They destroy a sense of national unity, equality, and mutual respect that are major pillars of a strong democracy.
Or again, particularly since about 1980, many of us have been bothered by rapidly growing income and wealth disparities and their fallout in unaffordable housing and health care, unfair compensation, and depressed wages. But we failed, I think, to see how devastating these growing disparities are to a democracy-oriented culture, to values such as equity (fundamental fairness), equal opportunity, and shared prosperity.
There are many other examples of major threats to value-based pillars of democracy. For example, the impact of disinformation and attacks on journalism dilute the capacity of voters to choose representatives wisely and dilute the capacity of those representatives to shape enlightened policy; the wholesale denigration of government (unending repetition of slogans like “government is the problem”) destroys both our trust in government and our cautious distrust of it; and the worship of billionaires lures us into surrendering large sectors of democracy, or even democracy itself, to them.
Democracy assessors are well-aware of the strong cultural base needed to support a democracy. All of us, liberals and conservatives, who cherish democracy need to embrace this view as well. Preserving the institutions of democracy requires us to preserve and vigorously defend a set of cultural values that supports it.
Paul Levy lives in Northampton.