U.S. downgraded to flawed democracy for the first time
The Democracy Index downgraded the U.S. from a full democracy to a flawed one, putting the country in the company of countries like India and Japan.
The Democracy Index has just downgraded the United States from a full democracy to a flawed one, a move that puts the United States in the company of countries like Botswana, India, Japan and Ghana, while most of Western Europe are still considered to be full democracies.
The Economic Intelligence Unit wrote in a Wednesday report that the move was prompted by the growing distrust that Americans have of the government and the media, not because of the election of Donald Trump specifically.
“The U.S. president, Donald Trump, is not to blame for this decline in trust, which predated his election, but he was the beneficiary of it,” the report read, explaining that the same distrust that prompted the United States’ lower democracy rating also pushed voters to favor a presidential candidate with no previous political experience.
The Democracy Index considers 60 different factors that feed into a scale from one to ten. In order to be considered a full democracy, a country has to score at least an 8.0 on the index, while the United States scored a 7.98 in 2016, making it the second-highest ranked flawed democracy after Japan and tying with Italy, with Cabo Verde, France and South Korea close behind by less than .1 points.
