This profile mirrors and is kept in sync with the Warning Signs in Established Democracies (United States, United Kingdom, Italy) entry in the main guide's case studies.
Overview
V-Dem's 2026 Democracy Report found the United States' Liberal Democracy Index fell 24 percent in a single year — among the fastest declines of any democracy on record — while Freedom House recorded the nation's lowest freedom score since it adopted its current 100-point scale in 2002. Developments feeding that assessment include:
- the barring of a major wire service from presidential press access in 2025;
- the September 2026 launch of a White House-run streaming news channel that critics have likened to state media;
- a 43-day federal government shutdown that closed national museums and parks;
- executive orders for new self-commemorating monuments.
The same V-Dem report named six new autocratizing countries in Europe and North America for 2025. Besides the United States, these included the United Kingdom, flagged for weakening freedom of expression, a deteriorating media environment, and narrowing limits on executive power, and Italy, where a March 2026 rule-of-law review documented a protest-criminalizing security decree, a parliamentary vote blocking the prosecution of ministers over the release of an ICC war-crimes suspect, two Constitutional Court rulings upholding weakened anti-corruption laws, and spyware found on a journalist's phone. Neither decline is as steep as the United States' — it is the presence of long-established Western democracies on an autocratizing list at all, not the severity of any single case, that V-Dem's researchers flagged as new.
Analytical lens
Concepts on this wiki that help explain this case: Democratic Backsliding and Executive Aggrandizement, Regime Types: How Democracy Is Measured, Autocratic Legalism.