Expert consensus goes aff.

Vanessa Williamson, “Understanding democratic decline in the United States,” Brookings Institute, 10-17-2023, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/understanding-democratic-decline-in-the-united-states/

Experts downgrade U.S. democracy

In 2020, then-President Trump, knowing that he had failed to win re-election, refused to concede and instead sought to subvert the vote counting and certification process. On January 6th, with President Trump’s encouragement, his supporters stormed the Capitol. The House Select Committee that investigated the January 6th attack concluded that the president had engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 Presidential election.”

But 2020 does not mark the beginning of democratic decline in the United States. Precise quantitative measures of democracy are difficult to develop—there are, for example, multiple metrics used just to define gerrymandering.12 But to measure the core elements of democracy between countries and over time, social scientists have developed a robust toolkit of indices that track and aggregate indicators of electoral processes, political participation, government functioning, and civil liberties. These indices vary somewhat in their measurement strategies, but across the board, they demonstrate substantial erosion of democratic functioning in the United States for years before President Trump’s 2020 election subversion attempt.

According to the Economist, the United States now ranks not among the world’s “full democracies” (such as Canada, Japan, and most of Western Europe) but among the “flawed democracies” (such as Greece, Israel, Poland, and Brazil).

Figure 1 summarizes the ratings the United States has received since 2008 in the Economist’s Democracy Index, Freedom House’s measure of Freedom in the World, and the “V-Dem” index from the Varieties of Democracy Institute at the University of Gothenburg.13 These indices come to a consistent conclusion: Freedom and democracy in the United States is in decline. According to the Economist, the United States now ranks not among the world’s “full democracies” (such as Canada, Japan, and most of Western Europe) but among the “flawed democracies” (such as Greece, Israel, Poland, and Brazil).

What is driving these shifts? As early as 2018, the researchers at the Varieties of Democracy Institute identified concerns about inadequate checks on executive power and the freedom and fairness of elections,14 issues that also feature in Freedom House and Economist analyses.15