Police officers arrest a protester during a ‘No Kings’ protest against Donald Trump’s perceived authoritarianism in Los Angeles in March. Photograph: Étienne Laurent/AFP/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Police officers arrest a protester during a ‘No Kings’ protest against Donald Trump’s perceived authoritarianism in Los Angeles in March. Photograph: Étienne Laurent/AFP/Getty Images Trump administration Democracy indicators in US at lowest levels for 50 years, data shows Trump administration undermining rule of law at home and worldwide, according to intergovernmental report
Prefer the Guardian on Google Key indicators of democracy in the US have fallen to their lowest levels in 50 years, with the global rule of law significantly undermined by the Trump administration’s “threats and actions”, data from a leading thinktank shows.
Around the world, judicial independence, credible elections and freedom of expression, press freedom and access to justice are all at their lowest levels for at least 30 years, according to the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International Idea) .
The intergovernmental organisation’s annual Global State of Democracy report is considered the most comprehensive of its kind, covering 174 countries and measuring democratic performance since 1975.
International Idea said the decline in the US was particularly marked, but part of a global trend, with 2025 the 11th consecutive year in which more countries declined than improved democratically – the longest continuous downturn since the thinktank’s records began.
“In 2025, the global challenges to democracy and the difficulty in stemming its erosion were both exemplified and compounded by political developments in the United States,” the report’s authors said.
“President Donald Trump quickly amassed power in the executive branch and wielded it to further a narrow set of personal goals and pursue retaliation against perceived enemies … The results have been far-reaching, undermining the rule of law domestically and internationally and testing longstanding alliances and multilateral cooperation.”
View image in fullscreen Donald Trump has made repeated false claims about the integrity of US elections. Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images Kevin Casas-Zamora , International Idea’s secretary general, warned that the risk of conflict rose as democracies deteriorated.
“The key message from our research is that investing in democracy should be at the heart of any country’s security strategy,” he said. “The connection between the erosion of the quality of democracy and increasing conflict is not being made either in policymaking or in the public debate.”
The separate Uppsala Conflict Data Program , based at Uppsala University in Sweden, shows that 2025 had the most violent conflicts – including the most interstate conflicts – of any year in its dataset, which goes back to 1946.
The International Idea report did highlight some positive developments, including in Australia – where civil society groups were consulted on an anti-racism strategy and children’s online privacy among other issues – and in Syria, where the repressive dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad was overthrown.
In Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, youth-led popular protests unseated long-serving leaders , but, the report noted, “it has proven difficult to create far-reaching, meaningful reform in a short period of time”.
Casas-Zamora said it was clear that e…