Bright Line Watch researchers see stabilization in democratic health but at lower levels after sharp decline

The health of American democracy, as measured by those who study it most closely, has settled into a diminished state – stabilizing after a sharp decline last year, but still well below the levels recorded before the start of Donald Trump’s second term, according to a new survey released on Tuesday.

The findings, by the non-partisan democracy-tracking project Bright Line Watch, which has surveyed hundreds of US scholars at American colleges and universities since 2017, suggest that the erosion of norms detected after Trump’s return to the White House last year has hardened into a new baseline. The public also holds a dim view of American democracy, the most recent survey found, but are sharply divided along partisan lines over how well the system is functioning.

The report draws on two waves of surveys. The first was conducted in late December and early January, a volatile period in which the Trump administration ramped up its immigration crackdown in Minnesota and US military forces bombed Venezuela and captured its leader, Nicolás Maduro. Given the gravity of both events, the researchers opted to field a second survey in February and early March to account for any shifts in perceptions, rather than release potentially outdated findings.

In the initial findings, experts’ views of US democracy rose to 60 on a scale of 100, up from a record-low of 53 in the early months of Trump’s second term. The researchers suggest the uptick may be attributed to Democrats’ success in a string of off-year elections – a sign that “the playing field had not been tilted against the opposition and that free and fair elections were still possible”, the report states. Following the toppling of Maduro, experts’ ratings slipped back to prior levels – 56 – and remained consistent in the second survey at 57.

Still, these ratings were notably higher than had been expected for the end of 2025, when forecasters predicted that US democratic performance would fall to 50. (AI forecasters predicted 52.)

During Trump’s first term and for the duration of Joe Biden’s presidency, ratings of US democracy were relatively stable, never falling below 60 or exceeding 70. Since then, scholars’ views of US democratic health have largely stabilized at lower levels, the researchers conclude, with modest fluctuations tied to major events.

If the trajectory offers a measure of assurance that democratic performance is no longer rapidly deteriorating, it also underscores a more sobering reality: experts see little evidence of a near-term recovery. On average, they project that American democracy will remain at roughly its current level through 2027, with only gradual improvement expected over the next decade.

Some recent studies have found that political scientists tend to show a “pessimism bias” in their assessments of democratic health. And Democrats have argued that winning control of one or both chambers of Congress in the November midterms would serve as a check on what they say are the president’s authoritarian ambitions.

The Bright Line Watch findings place the US in a similar position to other recent assessments, including those by Freedom House and by the the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, both of which reported steep democratic backsliding under the Trump administration. “The speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history,” the V-Dem institute said in its annual report released earlier this month.

The White House – and Trump himself – has forcefully pushed back against any suggestion that the president governs like an autocrat.

“I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office last year, responding to critics who decried his deployment of the national guard in Washington. “I am a man with great common sense, and I’m a smart person.”

Asked in the Bright Line Watch survey to evaluate US performance on 35 democratic principles, scholars’ assessments changed little, except for an improvement in their view of judicial checks on the executive branch, which researchers believe could reflect the recent supreme court ruling curtailing Trump’s power to impose tariffs and the end of the deployments of national guard to major US cities.

In a series of recent actions taken by the Trump administration, experts registered “near-unanimous” alarm. Ninety-six per cent said Trump’s demand that his attorney general, Pam Bondi, take legal action against his political opponents was a threat to democracy. Similarly, 95% of scholars cited his call to “nationalize” voting as a threat to democracy, and 93% said the same of his suggestion that Democratic lawmakers’ comments about unlawful military orders were “seditious behavior, punishable by death”.

Among the public, however, these same actions drew partisan response, with substantial approval from Republicans, especially those who identify more closely with Trump’s Maga movement than the Republican party. Notably, even as Trump and his allies have continued to cast doubt on election integrity, overall public confidence in the voting system remains roughly in line with levels before the 2020 election and is less polarized than it was ahead of the 2022 and 2024 midterms and presidential race.