Global Report Says U.S. Democracy Hit a 50-Year Low. The Supreme Court Blocked Trump on Voting Rules the Same Day.

A Foreign NGO's Scorecard Says America Is Backsliding

The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, or International IDEA, released its annual Global State of Democracy report Tuesday, September 15. The Stockholm-based group tracks 174 countries using data going back to 1975. Its conclusion: the United States has fallen to its lowest score in the 50 years the group has been measuring.

Dr. Seema Shah, who runs the group's democracy assessment team, told NPR the decline is unprecedented. "It's getting worse and worse," she said. "So that's really worrying, especially because we also see that people are more willing in some cases to consider non-democratic leadership or non-democratic governance."

The report's text is blunt about who it blames. It says that in 2025, "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." Shah calls the U.S. "the clearest example" of democratic decline worldwide, citing drops in nearly half of the 30 indicators the group tracks: freedom of expression, press freedom, credible elections, and effective parliamentary oversight.

Not a Legal Finding

Words like "amassed power" and "retaliation against perceived enemies" are International IDEA's characterizations. No court has ruled Trump violated the law by consolidating executive authority, and the report does not cite a specific statute, indictment, or conviction tied to that claim. That doesn't mean the concern is baseless, but it does mean readers should know it's an assessment by one advocacy-adjacent research group, not an adjudicated fact.

International IDEA is an intergovernmental organization funded by member states, and its "democracy index" methodology relies on expert coding of subjective categories. That's a legitimate research approach, but it's also inherently a judgment call, not a hard count of laws broken or elections stolen. Reasonable people can look at the same facts, like Trump's move to pull back on foreign democracy-promotion funding, and see either authoritarian retreat or a rejection of what Trump himself called "interventionist" nation-building. At a summit in Riyadh last year, Trump said the U.S. would stop giving other countries "lectures on how to live." Shah frames that as America abandoning global democratic leadership. A supporter of the administration would call it respecting other nations' sovereignty instead of exporting American values by force, a critique of U.S. foreign policy that predates Trump by decades.

The Courts Ruled on the Same Day

On the same day International IDEA released this report, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked President Trump's plan to restrict mail-in voting ahead of the November midterm elections, according to WBUR, carried by Nevada Public Radio. Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project, discussed the ruling on air.

A report arguing the executive branch is running unchecked landed the same day the nation's highest court told that same executive branch no on an election-rules change. Checks and balances, at least in this instance, worked exactly as designed. The article doesn't say why Trump wanted the restriction changed or what the Court's written reasoning was, so those specifics remain to be reported.

The Global Picture Is Messier Than "America Is Uniquely Broken"

International IDEA's own data shows this isn't just a U.S. story. According to the report, 57% of countries surveyed showed declines in at least one key democratic indicator. Shah told NPR she's watched declines like this correct themselves in the past, but says this cycle hasn't reversed. That's a global trend, not an American exception, even as the report singles out the U.S. as the sharpest single case.

NPR's coverage, echoed nearly word-for-word across member stations including WWNO, KUNR, KPBS, and ideastream, presents Shah's assessment largely without a countervailing voice from the Trump administration or a conservative election-law scholar. None of the coverage includes a response from the White House to the report's specific claims, and none of it mentions the same-day Supreme Court ruling as relevant context.

What's Actually Unresolved

International IDEA hasn't published a line-by-line breakdown showing which of the 30 indicators moved and by how much for the U.S. specifically, beyond Shah's claim that nearly half declined. The White House had not issued a public response to the report as of Tuesday evening. And with midterm elections seven weeks away, the Supreme Court's mail-in voting ruling means the actual voting rules Americans will use in November are still being fought out in court, not settled by any index.