Some political scientists warn that US democracy is under threat. Do forecasters expect US democracy to erode?

This index was created by the nonpartisan group Bright Line Watch (BLW), which monitors the state of American democracy. The index consists of 39 questions based on the democratic principles BLW monitors in the below six areas of concern. (Note that there are 39 questions to forecast, and the 'View Questions (154)' at the top of the index includes backfilled questions providing past data.)

Electoral integrity and competition
Political rights and participation
Civil liberties and expression
Rule of law and anti-corruption
Institutional checks and balances
Information integrity and influence

The questions are designed to be recurring, starting with ones that cover the two-year periods 2025-2026 and 2027-2028. Questions related to the 2028 presidential election will only be asked for the 2027-2028 period. To provide relevant context, the question resolutions and index values have been backfilled for 2021-2022 and 2023-2024. These should be interpreted as helpful base rates for forecasters, rather than ratings of threats to democracy in prior years. Read more about indexes here.

Bright Line Watch’s Research Approach

Bright Line Watch applies a standing democracy-and-institutions framework across parties. It has monitored democratic practices since 2017, publishes replicable survey data, does not ask expert respondents for their political attitudes, and has repeatedly reported findings critical of Democrats and figures on the left, including Democratic support for norm violations, California redistricting, Biden-family pardons, Democratic conspiracy beliefs about Trump assassination attempts, and Democratic support for aggression against CEOs. Nonpartisan should not be taken to mean "symmetrically critical at every moment"; BLW's view is that empirical threats can be asymmetric. But the record does not support the claim that BLW only scrutinizes Republicans.

Prize Structure

This tournament features a $10,000 prize split into two distinct prize pools:

A $7,500 regular prize awarded based on our usual time-averaged scores, with predictions being scored from December 12, 2025 onwards.
A $2,500 bonus prize awarded based on cumulative spot scores from your predictions at various snapshots during the tournament.

At the end of the tournament, every prediction that was standing at the time of each snapshot will be scored and your scores across snapshots will be summed to determine your share of the bonus prize.

Snapshots will be announced ahead of time and forecasters will be notified so that they can update their forecasts. The first snapshot will be taken on January 1, 2026 at 00:00 UTC and the others are currently expected to be in May 2026, September 2026, November 2026, April 2027, August 2027, December 2027, May 2028, and September 2028.

U.S. Democracy Threat Index

Questions