Can America recover from Trump? Here’s what new data says.

The president of the United States is deploying masked troops to the streets of blue cities, working to put friendly billionaires in charge of the media environment, and attempting to jail his personal enemies.

Can any democracy come back from this?

Earlier this year, two teams of researchers published papers trying to answer this exact question — and came to seemingly opposite conclusions.

Both papers focused on what they call “democratic U-turns:” where a country starts out as a democracy, moves toward authoritarianism, and then quickly recovers. The first team’s conclusions were optimistic: They identified 102 U-turn cases since 1900 and found that, in 90 percent of them, the result was “restored or even improved levels of democracy.” The second team focused on 21 recent cases and inverted the findings — concluding that “nearly 90 percent” of alleged U-turns were short-lived mirages.

So who’s right? To find out, I reexamined the basic data and spoke to researchers from each of the two teams. It turns out that the seemingly opposed findings are actually more consistent than they seem — with implications for the United States that are at once hopeful and disturbing.

The scholarly research on U-turns draws from a database called V-Dem, widely considered the gold standard for quantitative research on global democracy. V-Dem works by getting a broad group of experts on individual countries to give numerical assessments of different aspects of that country’s democracy (e.g., how free the press is, or whether elections are administered impartially). These judgments are turned into composite scores that assess how democratic a country is as a whole.

The first team of researchers, the more optimistic ones, are based at the institute that compiles and publishes the V-Dem database. Looking over their own data, authors Marina Nord, Fabio Angiolillo, Martin Lundstedt, Felix Wiebrecht, and Staffan I. Lindberg found that U-turns — defined as a country’s democracy score starting to increase after a recent decline — are very common. Over half of all countries that experience a slide toward autocracy also end up experiencing a U-turn. And those U-turns are typically very successful, hence the top-line finding that 90 percent of U-turns saw a country returning to its previous level of democracy or even improving on it.

To understand what a U-turn looks like more concretely, it’s helpful to look at the recent history of Poland. Once considered one of the strongest post-communist democracies, the right-wing PiS government elected in 2015 turned the country’s public broadcaster into propaganda and packed the judicial system with its own cronies. But in 2023, a coalition of opposition parties defeated PiS in national parliamentary elections and began trying to undo the damage. You can see, in Poland’s V-Dem score, the characteristic U-shaped curve — a decline under PiS and an increase after its defeat.

Yet this is all very new, and Poland has not returned to its pre-PiS democracy. Moreover, there’s a real question of whether its progress in the right direction can be sustained. The new coalition has had a lot of trouble fixing what PiS broke, and just this year narrowly lost the presidential election to the PiS candidate.

The second paper argues that such a failure to make sustained gains would be more common than not.

Its authors — Nic Cheeseman, Jennifer Cyr, and Mattías Bianchi — also use V-Dem data and focus their analysis on post-1994 cases of democratic U-turn. Twenty-one cases (out of the initial 102) fit these parameters. The authors then analyzed how many of those countries managed to maintain their higher, post U-turn democracy scores — looking at what happened in the years after the analysis of the first paper ended to see if the gains of a U-turn could be sustained.

The results weren’t promising. Of the 21 cases, 19 countries experienced another decline in their democracy score within five years of the seemingly successful U-turn. And the record of the two exceptions, Malawi and Mali, wasn’t exactly stellar.

“Malawi maintained a consistent, if low, level of democracy for the first five years after the U-turn, but in the sixth year became non-democratic once more,” the authors wrote. “Mali’s progress has been even less auspicious. The country remained stably democratic, if weakly so, for five years. But by year six, it too had become nondemocratic, suffering two coups in 2020 and 2021.”

Marina Nord and Nic Cheeseman, researchers from the first and second teams, respectively, both emphasized in phone calls that they didn’t see their findings as being in tension. In fact, Cheeseman said, the two groups were in communication and discussing joint projects going forward.

This is unusual in academic disputes, which (in my experience) often get petty and bitter. And it reflects the fact that the two papers may be two sides of the same coin.

Both scholars agree that modern autocratization is different from the historical pattern. Before the 1990s, democracies tended to be toppled by coups or revolutions — unmistakable uses of force that ended the current regime and replaced it with naked authoritarian rule.

Nowadays, thanks in large part to democracy’s increasingly dominant ideological position around the world, the threat tends to come in a more subtle and hidden form — what scholars call “democratic backsliding.” In these cases, a legitimately elected government changes the laws and rules of the political system to give itself increasingly unfair advantages in future elections. The ultimate aim is often to create a “competitive authoritarian” regime, where elections are not formally rigged but take place under such unfair conditions that they can’t truly be considered democratic. That’s what Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party did in Hungary, and what PiS tried to do in Poland.

Because democratic backsliding happens through law and political maneuvering, rather than at the point of a gun, its opponents have more avenues (such as litigation, legislative resistance, and elections) for disrupting it. This might be why the first team found that attempts at authoritarianism were actually more likely to end in a U-turn in the post-1994 period (73 percent of cases) than in the full historical sample (52 percent).

Yet at the same time, any individual defeat for authoritarian forces might be less permanent.

Because elected authoritarians were, well, elected, they often represent a real constituency in the country’s politics. This support base is often large enough to make it 1) impossible for their opponents to defeat them permanently and 2) democratically illegitimate for said opponents to outlaw them entirely. That means that, even if they’re voted out, there’s always a chance that someone representing that constituency could win a future election and make another bid to consolidate power.

This gives a tentative synthesis between the two papers: that contemporary attempts to destroy democracy usually fail in the near term, but often lead to future attempts down the line.

“Once you have a democracy, that doesn’t mean you automatically become a stable democracy,” Nord says, summarizing the points of agreement.

In 2013, the political scientist Dan Slater coined a term for this kind of whiplash: “democratic careening.” Careening democracies, per Slater, are “struggling but not collapsing”: They are places of “endemic unsettledness and rapid ricocheting” between what feel like wildly different governing models. Such a democracy “may be liable to ‘capsize,’ or tip over temporarily so that democracy ceases to function for a limited time — but not to vanish from the democratic ranks entirely through a restoration and consolidation of authoritarian rule.”

The recent papers suggest that Slater was ahead of his time: that in the decade-plus since his work came out, the state of affairs he is describing may be becoming increasingly common.

And right now, it looks like it might fit the United States rather well.

I have argued that, while President Donald Trump has developed an increasingly cogent plan for destroying American democracy, there are formidable obstacles in his path — including federalism, widespread public skepticism, a free press, and an independent judiciary. The research suggests that many countries with fewer effective barriers against autocratization have resisted bids like Trump’s, which should give us some optimism that what’s happening right now isn’t the end of American democracy.

“I don’t think the US is beyond the point of no return,” Cheeseman tells me.

But even if America experiences a U-turn upon Trump’s departure, the country may not be out of the woods. The forces that made Trump possible in the first place will still remain, open to exploitation by any political leader with the requisite savvy and shamelessness.

“There is a reason why Trump came to power, and there is a reason why he won those elections,” Nord says. “If you don’t solve the underlying reasons, then of course democracy will still be at risk.”