Is Impunity the Driver of U.S. Democratic Decline?

dr. gene e. Bigler, stockton, ca

What Comparative Analysis Suggests Lo que Sugiere el Análisis Comparativo

Abook case full of studies have analyzed and speculated about the cause of the decline of democracy since Freedom House sounded the alarm in 2017 after it observed 11 straight years in which the number of countries experiencing worsening of the quality of their governments was greater than those which were doing better. t he trend was considered so important because the experience since 2006 reversed over two decades of a pattern of more democracy, but the focus had not yet really turned to the U.S. Then in 2020 COVID and the January 6 insurrection suddenly made the reversal of the trend in democracy so much more vivid as the American birthplace of modern democracy and 70 other nations saw such remarkable declines compared to only 35 doing better.1

(see graphic below) b esides many brilliant commentaries and monographs on the subject, a veritable cottage industry of efforts to evaluate and compare the quality of democracy and governance arose to join the efforts pioneered by Freedom House. t he highly academic Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project based at the university of Gothenburg was joined by the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance indicators (WGI), Bertelsmann transformation i ndex (BTI), Sustainable Governance indicators (SGI), and the increasingly cited Economist i ntelligence u nit