The term "democratic backsliding" entered the political science lexicon in the 2010s to describe a gradual, incremental process — the slow erosion of checks, balances, and norms that, individually, might look like routine governance disputes but collectively represent a structural transformation of the state. Hungary under Viktor Orbán, Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Venezuela under Hugo Chávez: each of these cases followed a recognisable pattern. None looked, at the time, like a sudden coup. All produced, in the end, systems in which democratic competition was systematically disadvantaged.
Scholars who study democratic erosion have spent the two years since January 2025 debating whether the United States belongs on that list. The debate has largely been resolved. It does.
The Judiciary: From Constraint to Target
Article III of the Constitution establishes the federal judiciary as a co-equal branch of government. In practice, the relationship between executive power and judicial review has always been contested — presidents have occasionally defied court orders, tested boundaries, and made appointments designed to reshape jurisprudence. What has not, until recently, occurred is a sitting president openly calling for the imprisonment of sitting federal judges, the defunding of courts whose rulings he dislikes, and the deployment of federal marshals to "escort" judges whose decisions he characterises as seditious.
Between January and March 2026, the Trump administration defied no fewer than fourteen separate federal court injunctions. The methods varied: in some cases, agencies simply did not comply and filed procedural motions that delayed enforcement; in others, the administration argued that the courts lacked jurisdiction. In the case of Judge James Boasberg's injunction halting deportation flights to El Salvador, administration officials publicly stated they would not comply. When Boasberg held them in contempt, the Attorney General declined to enforce the order.
The Supreme Court, now with a 6-3 conservative supermajority, has not intervened in a pattern that former Supreme Court litigator Neal Katyal describes as "the court managing a rolling constitutional crisis by looking away from it." Three emergency applications to the Court to enforce lower court injunctions were denied without explanation in February 2026. The signal — to the administration and to the lower courts — was noted.
The Civil Service: Loyalty Over Competence
The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 established the principle that federal employment should be based on merit rather than political allegiance. It was a response to the "spoils system" — the practice of filling government positions with party loyalists regardless of qualification — that had produced spectacular corruption and incompetence in the decades following the Civil War.
Schedule F, reinstated by executive order on January 20, 2025, effectively repeals the Pendleton Act for an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 federal positions by reclassifying career civil servants in "policy-related" roles as at-will employees removable without cause or appeal. The administration has used it aggressively. Between January and March 2026, over 21,000 federal employees have been terminated, placed on administrative leave, or pressured into early retirement. The targets have been concentrated in agencies with oversight responsibilities: inspectors general (17 fired), independent regulatory agencies, and the intelligence community.
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The consequences are not abstract. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, gutted of investigative staff, has suspended enforcement actions against payday lenders. The Environmental Protection Agency, operating with 2,300 fewer scientists and enforcement officers than in 2024, has withdrawn 340 pending enforcement actions. The Food and Drug Administration has delayed drug approvals as its review staff fell below operational minimums.
The Electoral Architecture
Democratic elections require three conditions: that eligible citizens can vote, that votes are counted accurately, and that the result is accepted by the loser. The United States in 2026 is at varying stages of compromising all three.
The Help America Vote Act of 2002, the Motor Voter Act, and the Voting Rights Act collectively established a floor of federal protection for voter access. Since January 2025, the administration has moved aggressively against all three. The Department of Justice's Voting Section, which historically monitored elections in states with histories of discrimination, has been ordered to redirect its resources toward investigating non-citizen voting — a statistically negligible phenomenon that multiple federal studies have found accounts for fewer than 0.0001 percent of ballots cast.
Meanwhile, a coordinated effort led by True the Vote and allied state-level Republican majorities has purged approximately 3.7 million voters from rolls in eleven states using a methodology — matching voter registration records against national change-of-address databases — that the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals found "systematically generates false positives, disproportionately removing legitimate voters." The purges proceeded despite the ruling, under emergency motions that are still being litigated.
The 2026 Midterm Landscape
The November 2026 midterm elections will be the first federal election conducted under the new landscape. Several states with competitive House races have enacted legislation requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register — a requirement that the Carter Centre has previously documented as a barrier that disproportionately affects low-income voters, who are less likely to possess passports and more likely to have experienced delays or errors in obtaining birth certificates.
The Federal Election Commission, which has constitutional responsibility for administering federal elections, currently lacks a quorum to act: three of its six commissioner positions are vacant, nominations have not been made, and without a quorum it cannot issue advisory opinions, investigate complaints, or certify candidates for federal matching funds. This is not an accident. It is a governing strategy.
Comparative Perspective: Where America Stands
The international democracy monitoring organisations that track these developments — Freedom House, the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project at the University of Gothenburg, and the Economist Intelligence Unit — have each independently downgraded the United States in their 2026 assessments. V-Dem, which tracks 71 indicators of democratic health across 202 countries, recorded the United States' largest single-year decline since V-Dem began publishing data in 1900. Freedom House moved the US from "Free" to "Partly Free" in its annual global assessment — a designation it has previously applied to countries including Hungary, Serbia, and Singapore.
"We have assessed the United States before," said Adrian Shahbaz, Freedom House's Vice President for Research. "We have never done it quite like this. The speed matters. Hungary took a decade. This has taken fourteen months."
The Counter-Forces
Democratic erosion is not inevitable. The countries that have most successfully resisted it — Poland, which removed its illiberal government in 2023, and Brazil, which prosecuted the perpetrators of its January 8 Capitol-style attack — did so through the combined action of an activated civil society, an independent judiciary that held its ground, opposition parties that remained unified, and international pressure that raised the cost of autocratic consolidation.
All of these counter-forces are present in the United States, in varying degrees of effectiveness. The federal judiciary, despite the administration's pressure, continues to issue rulings against executive overreach — and most are eventually being enforced. Congressional Democrats, unified in opposition, have used minority procedural rights to slow legislative consolidation. Civil society — from the ACLU to the AFL-CIO to the network of state attorneys general who have brought 140 federal lawsuits against administration actions — remains energised and legally active.
But the counter-forces are fighting on terrain that tilts increasingly against them. Courts can strike down illegal action, but they cannot compel a president to care about their rulings. Congress can obstruct, but a Senate majority and a compliant Speaker constrain its power. Civil society can organise, but an administration that is willing to deploy the IRS, the DOJ, and the federal contracting system against its opponents has tools of pressure that organised civil society struggles to match.
The question for American democracy in 2026 is not whether it is under threat. That debate is over. The question is whether the institutions, the counter-forces, and the political will exist to stop the demolition before the building comes down.