US a Backsliding Democracy for 1st Time, Says Think Tank

Here is more from the Washington Post:

The United States for the first time was added to a list of “backsliding democracies” in a report released Monday by the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.

“The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale,” the International IDEA’s Global State of Democracy 2021 report said.

 The study, which analyzed trends from 2020 to 2021, found that more than a quarter of the world’s population now lives in democratically backsliding countries, which International IDEA defines as nations seeing a gradual decline in the quality of their democracy.

 

The article notes that an Oct. 2020 study by the Washington, DC-based think tank Freedom House found that democracy and human rights had worsened in 80 countries since March of that year. 

Meanwhile, in her new book How Civil Wars Start, Barbara Walter draws on data compiled by the Center for Systematic Peace, as well as Freedom House, Polity V, and Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project to highlight key factors that make civil war likely.