Regime Fragility in the United States: What the Comparative Literature Measures and What the Next Two Years Test

Four instruments recorded declines in American democracy this year. The V-Dem Institute moved the United States out of its liberal democracy category, Freedom House scored it 81 of 100, its lowest score ever, Bright Line Watch’s 568 political scientists rated it at 60 on a 100-point scale, and Protect Democracy’s Authoritarian Threat Index reads 3.3 of 5. Every one of them answers a single question, whether the constitutional order survives. This paper reviews the comparative literature on authoritarian durability, from Svolik, Bellin, Levitsky and Way, Hale, Howard and Roessler, Chenoweth and Stephan, Nord and colleagues, and Graham and Svolik, and applies its findings to the elections and uprisings of the past year in Brazil, Hungary, Nepal, Madagascar, Iran, South Korea and Colombia. The literature separates four questions, whether the constitutional order survives, whether the ruling coalition keeps power, whether the leader stays, and whether the country stays governable, and answers each one separately. Two-thirds of the dictators in Svolik’s data were removed by their own insiders; the will of the security forces to repress decided Cairo, Damascus, Kathmandu and Antananarivo; and 73 percent of the autocratization episodes of the last 30 years reversed, most within five years of onset, through elections the regime still had to hold. The paper distinguishes consolidated fascist regimes, none of which has ended at a ballot box, from competitive authoritarian regimes, whose tilted elections the government can still lose, places the United States in the second category, sets out the four results possible on Nov. 3, 2026, and concludes that the elections decide whether the insiders recalculate and the insiders decide whether the regime lasts.