The Autocracy Ratchet: Scoring America's Democratic Erosion Quarter by Quarter

There is a standard move in political commentary when authoritarian tendencies appear in a democracy: compare them to the worst historical cases, find them wanting, and conclude the alarm is overstated. It is a move that has served badly in every historical case where democracy actually broke down. The people who made it in Weimar Germany, in pre-Chávez Venezuela, in pre-Orbán Hungary, were not stupid. They were applying a reasonable prior (that their country was probably not the exception) to a situation where their country actually was.

What makes the current moment different is not the rhetoric of alarm. It is the data. Five institutions that measure democratic health independently, using different methodologies, different funding sources, and different teams of researchers, have all moved their assessments of the United States in the same direction, in the same period, at unusual speed. That convergence is worth taking seriously on its own terms.

What the Authoritarian Drift Index measures

The composite Authoritarian Drift Index (ADI) used in this piece tracks the United States from 2005 through the end of 2025. The ADI is not a single official index. It is a synthesis of eight dimensions drawn from V-Dem's Liberal Democracy Index, Freedom House's annual country scores, the EIU Democracy Index, and qualitative markers from Umberto Eco's 1995 "Ur-Fascism" framework and Robert Paxton's comparative work on fascism's mobilizing passions.

The eight dimensions are: electoral integrity, judicial independence, press freedom, state surveillance, civil liberties, enemy construction (the systematic identification of internal enemies to justify state action), cult of leadership, and state violence or threat. Scores run from 0 (full liberal democracy) to 100 (closed totalitarian state). Higher scores mean more authoritarian.

Reading the chart. Substack strips embedded JavaScript, so the interactive chart from the original article cannot render here. The quarter-by-quarter table below preserves the underlying data: each row is a quarter, each ADI score reflects the worst single event recorded in that period, and each entry is sourced.

The quarter-by-quarter timeline

What the sources actually say

The five sources below represent distinct institutional perspectives (academic, NGO, commercial research, and legal scholarship). Their convergence on direction is more significant than their differences in degree.

The ratchet mechanism

What distinguishes the current period from earlier episodes of norm erosion (the post-9/11 surveillance expansion, Citizens United, the polarization of the 2010s) is the speed and the self-reinforcing nature of the changes. Each institutional capitulation makes the next one easier. Each successful legal challenge that fails to produce compliance makes future challenges less credible as deterrents.

In a democracy, if you win a lawsuit, you win; that settles the conflict. In a country that isn't a democracy, when you win a lawsuit, you still lose if it's against the government, because they find other ways to bully or to inflict pain.

Erica Chenoweth, Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment, Harvard Kennedy School, as paraphrased in "The Breakdown" webinar series, 2025.

Levitsky and Way's framework of competitive authoritarianism is useful here precisely because it describes a stable equilibrium, not a transitional moment. Countries in this zone (Hungary since roughly 2014, Turkey since 2017, Venezuela through the Chávez years) maintain the formal apparatus of elections and constitutional government while systematically tilting the playing field. The elections happen. The opposition is legal. But the costs of opposing the government are real enough to deter, and the state apparatus is available as a weapon against named enemies.

The chart shows the steepest single-quarter rise in Q1 2025: the period of mass civil servant firings, DOJ/FBI capture, and USAID dismantlement. This matches what Levitsky, Way, and Ziblatt called explicitly "faster than Orbán's Hungary, Erdoğan's Turkey, and Chávez's Venezuela in their respective first years." That is not a rhetorical flourish from activists. It is a technical comparative judgment from scholars who spent decades studying those cases.

Key asymmetry. Electoral integrity remains the strongest dimension; elections are still held, the opposition is still legal, and the EIU continues to score the US strongly on electoral process and pluralism. This is exactly what "competitive authoritarianism" looks like: formally competitive elections coexisting with systematic state weaponization against opponents. The elections are the legitimizing mechanism, not a refutation of the broader trend.

What this does and doesn't mean

The convergence of measurement institutions on a downward trajectory is significant. What it does not mean is predetermined outcome. Levitsky, Way, and Ziblatt are explicit in their December 2025 Foreign Affairs piece that the situation is reversible, that "two things can be true at once: Americans face an authoritarian government, and the avenues for contestation remain open." The Democratic Party's success in the November 2025 elections is cited as evidence that competitive authoritarianism can be contested and defeated at the ballot box.

What the data does mean is that the US can no longer serve as a credible reference point for global democratic norms, a role it has played, with varying degrees of justification, since 1945. The 2026 Freedom House report notes that the US withdrawal from USAID, international organizations, and democracy support infrastructure has already weakened the global democratic ecosystem in ways that outlast any single administration.

For those building alternatives to surveillance-driven information infrastructure (the tools, protocols, and communities designed to function in environments where institutional trust cannot be assumed) the data suggests the window for establishment is narrowing rather than widening. The infrastructure of control, once built, is difficult to dismantle. The infrastructure of resistance, once neglected, is difficult to rebuild.

What constituents can actually do

Three of the institutions in the table above (V-Dem, Freedom House, CIVICUS) explicitly note that the current trajectory is reversible through ordinary democratic mechanisms: elections, congressional oversight, and sustained civic pressure on representatives. Levitsky and Ziblatt make the same point in print. The institutions of contestation in the United States are weakened, not gone. They respond to use. They atrophy without it.

Concretely: every member of the U.S. House and Senate keeps a constituent-call tally. Those tallies go to the member at the end of each day and they are weighted heavily on votes where the member is undecided. A ninety-second call costs nothing. An email through the office web form takes ten minutes. Both are recorded.

Find your representatives

Use these to identify and reach the people who represent you. All three sites take a ZIP code and return your House member, your two senators, and their Washington office contact information.

• U.S. House: house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative
• U.S. Senate: senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm
• 5 Calls (current scripts on multiple democratic-erosion issues, with direct numbers): 5calls.org
• U.S. Capitol Switchboard (transfers to any office): 202-224-3121

The issues that map directly onto the events recorded above and that are currently before Congress include: oversight of mass federal-workforce removals and Schedule F revival; appropriations conditions on agencies that have been politicized (DOJ, FBI, FTC, FCC, USAID's residual functions); restoration of CPB funding; the FISA Section 702 reauthorization fight and the data-broker loophole that the Government Surveillance Reform Act would close; and the Posse Comitatus and Insurrection Act questions raised by the Los Angeles deployment. On any of these, naming a specific bill in a constituent call is more effective than a general expression of concern.

A note on framing. Members of Congress, particularly older members, tend to respond more readily to constitutional and procedural arguments than to technological or comparative-politics ones. "The government is searching citizens' records without a warrant," "the executive is dismantling agencies that Congress created," and "career civil servants were removed without cause" are arguments grounded in the document those representatives swore to uphold. They land. Use them.

Methodology and sources

The Authoritarian Drift Index is a composite synthesized from: the V-Dem Liberal Democracy Index (University of Gothenburg, covers 202 countries from 1789 to 2025, 4,200+ expert coders); Freedom House Freedom in the World (annual since 1972, 100-point scale); Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index (annual since 2006, 0–10 scale, 60 indicators); CIVICUS Monitor (civic-space ratings: open / narrowed / obstructed / repressed / closed); and qualitative assessment frameworks from Umberto Eco, "Ur-Fascism" (1995) and Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (2004).

Academic sources: Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism (Cambridge, 2010); Levitsky, Way and Ziblatt, "The Path to American Authoritarianism," Foreign Affairs (Feb 2025); Levitsky, Way and Ziblatt, "The Price of American Authoritarianism," Foreign Affairs (Dec 2025); Levitsky and Chenoweth, Harvard Kennedy School "The Breakdown" webinar series (2025).

The ADI is not a published academic index. Scores represent a synthesis across these sources and should be interpreted as directional indicators, not precise measurements.

Further reading

• V-Dem: "Democratic Backsliding Reaches Western Democracies, with U.S. Decline 'Unprecedented'" (Mar 2025)
• Freedom House: Freedom in the World 2026: The Growing Shadow of Autocracy
• CIVICUS: "United States of America" press release (Dec 2025) and USA Watchlist 2025
• NPR Fresh Air: "America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'" (22 Apr 2025)
• Robert Paxton: "I've Hesitated to Call Donald Trump a Fascist. Until Now" (Newsweek, 11 Jan 2021)
• TIME: "U.S. Shows Signs of 'Rapid Authoritarian Shift,' Report Warns"
• Pew Research Center: "Multiple indicators show a decline in the health of America's democracy in 2025"

Civic action:

• house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative
• senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm
• 5calls.org
• U.S. Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121

Part of a series on how surveillance and authoritarian infrastructure is assembled in democratic and semi-democratic contexts. See also, in reading order: The Blacklist Machine: How Russia Built a Surveillance State, The Gavel, Not the Gun: How Viktor Orbán Dismantled Hungary's Democracy, A Gift from God: How Erdoğan Turned a Failed Coup Into an Authoritarian State, The Permission Slip: Palantir's Manifesto and the Architecture Already in Place, The Receipt You Didn't Sign: FISA, Data Brokers, and AI, Protect the Children: The Global Surveillance Playbook, Child Safety as a Backdoor to the Surveillance State.