Published in March 2026 and based on 2025 data, V-Dem’s latest report does not say that the United States has ceased to be a democracy altogether. Its claim is subtler, and arguably more disturbing: the U.S. has fallen from the category of liberal democracy to that of electoral democracy for the first time in more than fifty years. The distinction is crucial. In V-Dem’s framework, an electoral democracy can still hold free and fair multiparty elections, but a liberal democracy must also preserve strong checks on executive power, civil liberties, and equality before the law. America still passed the electoral test, largely because the 2024 election was assessed as free and fair; it failed the liberal one. That is why its Electoral Democracy Index fell from .84 to .74, while its Liberal Democracy Index plunged from 0.75 to 0.57—the sharpest annual decline the country has suffered in V-Dem’s historical series. (v-dem.net)
What, then, broke first? V-Dem’s answer is institutional. The report describes a cascade in which weakened legislative oversight enabled rapid presidential power concentration. Legislative constraints on the executive dropped from 0.86 to 0.61 in 2025, a one-third loss and the lowest level in more than a century; judicial constraints also declined to their weakest point since 1900. From there, the erosion spread outward: purges of disfavored officials, diminished oversight, contempt for adverse court rulings, and growing pressure on law firms, watchdogs, and state institutions. A Carnegie Endowment study places this pattern in a comparative frame and calls it “executive aggrandizement”: democratic erosion from within, driven not by a dramatic coup but by the slow hollowing-out of accountability through executive action, coercive funding threats, and intimidation. (v-dem.net)
The final stage of the chain is societal. V-Dem finds that freedom of expression fell from 0.94 in 2023 to 0.73 in 2025, its lowest level since the end of World War II, while civil rights and equality before the law sank to levels not seen in roughly sixty years. Yet the report explicitly warns against simplistic nostalgia: America is not merely “back in 1965.” During the Civil Rights era, the central democratic defect was formal exclusion; today, the damage lies in the corrosion of oversight, legality, and pluralism. Elections remain largely intact—for now. That is precisely why the diagnosis is so unsettling: a country can keep voting and still lose the liberal architecture that makes those votes genuinely secure. (v-dem.net)
