“The speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history,” one of the world’s top democracy researchers says in a new report.
The Varieties of Democracies Institute, or V-Dem, a research group based in Sweden, cites the “suppression and intimidation of media and dissenting voices” as a key reason for the “derailment of democracy” in the United States.
The researchers say that freedom of expression in the US “is now at its lowest level since the end of WWII.”
The findings are featured in the 2026 edition of V-Dem’s annual Democracy Report, which finds that the US and 43