US democracy indicators fall to 50-year low, IDEA report finds

Global democratic decline now in eleventh straight year, report finds

The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, a Stockholm-based intergovernmental organization, said Monday that key indicators of democracy in the United States have fallen to their lowest levels in 50 years, with rule of law significantly undermined by the Trump administration’s “threats and actions.”

The findings are part of International IDEA’s annual Global State of Democracy report, which is considered the most comprehensive assessment of its kind, covering 174 countries and measuring democratic performance since 1975. The thinktank assigns countries to one of three categories: democracies, “hybrid” governments and authoritarian regimes.

International IDEA said the decline in the United States was particularly marked but part of a global trend, with 2025 the eleventh consecutive year in which more countries declined than improved democratically — the longest continuous downturn since the thinktank’s records began. Around the world, judicial independence, credible elections, freedom of expression, press freedom and access to justice are at their lowest levels in at least 30 years, according to the report.

“In 2025, the global challenges to democracy and the difficulty in stemming its erosion were both exemplified and compounded by political developments in the United States,” the report’s authors wrote. “President Donald Trump quickly amassed power in the executive branch and wielded it to further a narrow set of personal goals and pursue retaliation against perceived enemies … The results have been far-reaching, undermining the rule of law domestically and internationally and testing longstanding alliances and multilateral cooperation.”

The report placed the United States among what it called “backsliding” democracies — a designation International IDEA first applied to the country in 2021, citing a “visible deterioration” it said began in 2019.

Kevin Casas-Zamora, International IDEA’s secretary general, framed the decline as a security issue and warned of a connection between democratic erosion and rising conflict that he said was not being made in policymaking or public debate.

“The key message from our research is that investing in democracy should be at the heart of any country’s security strategy,” Casas-Zamora said. “The connection between the erosion of the quality of democracy and increasing conflict is not being made either in policymaking or in the public debate.”

The findings come alongside separate data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, based at Uppsala University in Sweden, showing that 2025 had the most violent conflicts — including the most interstate conflicts — of any year in its dataset, which goes back to 1946.

Globally, the IDEA report found rule of law was the weakest area of democracy in 2025, with 71 countries — 41 percent of those assessed — ranked as low-performing. Twenty-nine countries registered downturns in rule of law during the year, the report said.

Casas-Zamora said it was clear that events in the United States shape global politics. “Whatever happens in the US goes global,” he said. “There is now an epidemic of election denialism, of which the patient zero is the current occupant of the White House.”

He also cautioned against treating the decline as irreversible. “I am not willing to say the deterioration of the quality of democracy is inevitable or permanent,” Casas-Zamora said. “It can be reversed. We live in a volatile world and that means things can happen which create very positive political openings.”

The report highlighted a number of countries where conditions improved. In Australia, civil society groups were consulted on an anti-racism strategy and children’s online privacy. In Syria, the repressive dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad was overthrown. In Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, youth-led protests unseated long-serving leaders, though the report noted that “it has proven difficult to create far-reaching, meaningful reform in a short period of time.”

The IDEA authors also documented what they described as a narrowing of civic space worldwide. “While people continue to push back against democratic deterioration, civic space is narrowing,” they wrote. “Civil society and civic engagement have suffered, due in part to the widespread use of strategic lawsuits against public participation, foreign agent laws, and the criminalisation of peaceful protests.”