Warning Signs in Established Democracies (United States, United Kingdom, Italy)

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.

Democracy indicators

Analytical lens

Concepts on this wiki that help explain this case: Democratic Backsliding and Executive Aggrandizement, Regime Types: How Democracy Is Measured, Autocratic Legalism.