Regime Fragility in the United States: What the Comparative Literature Measures and What the Next Two Years Test

Will this last? The comparative literature on authoritarian durability addresses that question directly, with datasets of every dictatorship since 1946, every democracy that died, every campaign to overthrow a government since 1900 and every election an autocrat lost. This article reviews that literature and applies its findings to the elections and uprisings of the past year in Brazil, Hungary, Nepal, Madagascar, Iran and South Korea.

The question “will this last” is four different questions, and the research answers each one separately. The constitutional order is one object, and the autocratization research (V-Dem, Freedom House, the Economist Intelligence Unit, Nancy Bermeo’s work on backsliding) measures whether that order survives. The ruling coalition, MAGA and the officials and donors who hold power with it, is a second object, and the authoritarian durability research measures whether a government like this one keeps power. The leader is a third, because the research on personalist rule separates the leader’s exit from the regime’s survival. The country itself is a fourth, and the political instability research measures whether the United States stays governable and at peace.

In March the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg, which scores democracy in 202 countries from hundreds of indicators coded by thousands of country experts, moved the United States out of its liberal democracy category and into electoral democracy. Their report puts American democracy back at the level of 1965 and describes the scale and speed of the change as unprecedented in modern times.

Freedom House, founded in 1941 and publishing Freedom in the World since 1973, scored the United States 81 of 100, its lowest score ever, a 3-point drop matched among free countries only by Bulgaria.

Bright Line Watch, the survey project political scientists at Dartmouth, the University of Chicago and the University of Rochester have conducted since 2017, had 568 political scientists rate American democracy at 60 on a 100-point scale in July, down from 67 in November 2024. Protect Democracy’s Authoritarian Threat Index, built on the Authoritarian Warning Survey, which George Washington University political scientists conduct by polling a pool of about 1,000 democracy scholars every weekday, reads 3.4 of 5, severe threat.

All four of those measures answer the same question, whether the constitutional order survives. None of them answers whether this government keeps power, and that is the question the rest of this article is about.

On Sunday Brazilians reelected President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva with 51.8 percent of the valid vote over Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, whose father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, is serving a 27-year prison sentence for attempting a coup after he lost to Lula in 2022.

Flávio Bolsonaro, at a podium in Brasília that night with his running mate and his campaign coordinator beside him, said it is “impossible to recognize the outcome of this election”, and that his lawyers will ask the courts to annul it. Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court, which administers and certifies the country’s elections, reported that its election-day integrity test, in which auditors cast paper ballots into randomly chosen voting machines and compare them with the machine tallies, found no discrepancy.

In April Hungarian voters ended Viktor Orbán’s 16 years in power. The European Parliament had declared Hungary in 2022 to be “a hybrid regime of electoral autocracy”. Péter Magyar led the Tisza party to 138 of the 199 seats in parliament, a two-thirds majority, on record turnout of about 79 percent.

On Nov. 3 the United States holds its own election, and either thing can happen here. The governing party can lose and concede, as Orbán did, or the losing side can contest the count, as Flávio Bolsonaro is doing. The difference between Brazil’s contested count and an American one is who commands the police and soldiers. Flávio Bolsonaro is contesting the result from a Senate seat, with neither under his command. An American refusal would come from the party that holds the presidency and, with it, command of the armed forces and ICE.

Milan Svolik, a Yale political scientist whose 2012 book The Politics of Authoritarian Rule built a dataset of every dictatorship from 1946 to 2008, argues that every authoritarian government faces two problems, control of the people it rules and power sharing with the elites it rules with, and that the second one ends more regimes.

His 2009 study in the American Journal of Political Science counted 303 dictators who lost power by nonconstitutional means and found 205 removed by regime insiders and 32 by popular uprising. Two-thirds of the dictators in the dataset fell to the people standing next to them.

The rule for the United States follows directly: the people positioned in the data to end this regime are inside its coalition, the senators, governors, donors, generals and judges whose cooperation the coalition needs, and every indicator worth reading measures their cohesion.

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Eva Bellin, a Brandeis political scientist, wrote the 2004 article in Comparative Politics that put the security forces at the center of the durability research. Her finding: a regime survives as long as its coercive apparatus keeps both the capacity and the will to repress, and four things set those, the fiscal health of the forces, their international support networks, whether they are professional or built on patronage, and how many people are in the streets.

Her 2012 reconsideration after the Arab Spring kept the will to repress as the decisive variable: the Egyptian army let Hosni Mubarak fall and the Syrian army fired on Syrians. A professional force promoted by merit and bound by law is the kind that declines to fire, and the last 13 months produced two readings of that variable.

In Nepal, police killed 19 protesters on Sept. 8, 2025, the first day of the youth protests against corruption and a social media ban. The next morning Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli left his residence in an army helicopter and resigned, the army chief, Gen. Ashok Raj Sigdel, went on television that evening to call for talks, and by Sept. 11 the generals were at army headquarters negotiating with the protesters over who would be prime minister; the protesters named a former chief justice, Sushila Karki, and she was sworn in the next day.

In Madagascar, Col. Michael Randrianirina of the CAPSAT unit, the unit that had put President Andry Rajoelina in power in 2009, posted a video on Oct. 11, 2025 telling the security forces to refuse any order to shoot the demonstrators; his soldiers walked the protesters into the capital’s main square the next day, the gendarmerie joined on Oct. 13, Rajoelina left the country, and Randrianirina was sworn in as interim president on Oct. 17.

In the United States, Bellin’s finding comes down to which force gets the order to fire: the military, promoted by merit and sworn to the Constitution, or the second force the regime is building. Congress gave ICE $76.5 billion, nearly 10 times its annual budget, close to $30 billion of it to hire 10,000 officers.

Steven Levitsky of Harvard and Lucan Way of the University of Toronto, the two scholars who named competitive authoritarianism in 2002, published Revolution and Dictatorship with Princeton in 2022 to answer why some dictatorships survive everything. Their finding: the most durable dictatorships on earth, China, Cuba, Iran, the Soviet Union and Vietnam, were born of violent social revolution, and the counterrevolutionary wars that followed destroyed every rival power center and forced the party and the security forces into a single loyal structure.

Iran is on that list, and January was their finding in real time. Protests over the collapse of the currency began on Dec. 28, 2025 and spread across the country; on Jan. 8 the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, its Basij battalions and the police opened fire nationwide and the government cut the internet. The regime’s own Supreme National Security Council put the dead at 3,117, Human Rights Watch found evidence that thousands were killed, and by Jan. 12 the protests were over with no sign of defection from the government or its security forces.

Henry Hale of George Washington University, whose 2015 book Patronal Politics covers every post-Soviet regime, showed that single-pyramid systems built around one patron break down when succession looms and the networks under the patron start maneuvering for what comes after him.

This presidency ends Jan. 20, 2029, Trump turned 80 in June, and the networks under him are already maneuvering; Bright Line Watch’s experts expect American democracy to fall to 49 by 2032 if a Trump-endorsed Republican wins in 2028, to rise to 67 if a Republican he did not endorse wins, and to 72 if a Democrat wins. By the personalism research the regime is at its strongest now and at its weakest the day its coalition starts planning for his exit.

Marc Morjé Howard of Georgetown and Philip Roessler of William & Mary published the study of elections under competitive authoritarianism in the American Journal of Political Science in 2006. They asked why incumbents who use coercion and fraud sometimes lose anyway, and their answer across every case was a strategic opposition coalition, which explained those incumbent defeats better than any structural or institutional factor.

Erica Chenoweth of the Harvard Kennedy School and Maria Stephan, then at the State Department, built the dataset of every campaign to overthrow a government or win independence from 1900 to 2006 for Why Civil Resistance Works (2011) and found nonviolent campaigns succeeded 53 percent of the time against 26 percent for violent ones. The mechanism is the one Bellin found from the other side: a campaign wins when it produces defections inside the regime, including the security forces. The newest rows are the 2025 youth protests in Nepal, Madagascar, Indonesia, Kenya, Morocco, Peru and the Philippines, and governments fell in two of the seven, the two where the army declined to put the protests down.

Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law on the night of Dec. 3, 2024 and sent troops to surround the National Assembly; lawmakers climbed the walls, voted unanimously to overturn the decree, and it was lifted within six hours. On Feb. 19 the Seoul Central District Court sentenced Yoon to life in prison for leading an insurrection.

Marina Nord, Fabio Angiolillo, Martin Lundstedt, Felix Wiebrecht and Staffan Lindberg of the V-Dem team published the first systematic count of what they call U-turns in Democratization in 2025: 52 percent of all autocratization episodes since 1900 became U-turns, 73 percent in the last 30 years, and 90 percent of the U-turns ended with democracy restored or improved. V-Dem’s policy brief on the same data adds that in most of those cases the democracy broke down first and came back, and that the reversal came on average within five years of onset. Hungary’s reversal came through the election the regime still had to hold, 16 years after Orbán took office, and Poland’s came in 2023 after eight.

I have written in this publication that once you elect fascists, elections do not remove them, and the record behind that sentence stands: Germany and Italy ended in war, Spain at the dictator’s death, Portugal by a military coup, and Greece’s junta after a failed war in Cyprus. No consolidated fascist regime has ended at a ballot box. The U-turn data describe a different kind of regime, one Levitsky and Way named competitive authoritarianism: the elections are tilted, and the government can still lose them. Russia holds elections, and Putin cannot lose one; Orbán held elections, and in April he lost one. In a competitive authoritarian regime the election removes no one by itself. The insiders do, and the election is where the insiders decide. The United States is in that category: its elections are tilted, and the government can still lose them.

Matthew Graham and Svolik published Democracy in America? in the American Political Science Review in 2020, a survey experiment with a representative sample of Americans choosing between candidates, and found that in matchups built to resemble real races only 3.5 percent of voters abandoned their own candidate over an undemocratic position. By their numbers a majority-party candidate in most House districts can violate a democratic principle and keep the seat, which leaves the elites inside the coalition as the check.

Bright Line Watch’s experts are 94 percent confident the votes will be counted as voters intend in their own states and 82 percent nationwide; the public is at 74 and 60. The share of Republicans who say American elections are free of pervasive fraud fell from 50 percent in February 2025 to 25 percent after a year of the president claiming the opposite, including his July 16 national address, and Republican confidence in the national count fell from 70 to 58 percent between March and July. And in Bright Line Watch’s standing measure of the two Republican factions, Republican Party supporters outnumber Trump supporters in 2026, reversing the balance that held through most of 2024 and 2025. In Svolik’s terms every one of those is a cohesion reading, and every one fell this year. The elites are being told by their own voters that the elections are rigged, which is the condition under which a coalition either accepts the count or contests it.

Four results are possible on Nov. 3. If the governing party loses the House and accepts the count, that is the liberalizing electoral outcome in Howard and Roessler’s data, the one Colombia produced on June 21, when the governing coalition’s candidate lost the runoff by under a point and President Gustavo Petro, after alleging fraud, recognized the result three days later; it is the point at which the coalition’s insiders start recalculating, and the five-year clock the V-Dem team measured starts. If it loses and contests the count, the variables become Bellin’s at once, which force takes the order to block the count and whether the courts ratify the refusal, the sequence Brazil entered on Sunday night; the calibrated experts put a 14 percent chance on two or more losing governor or Senate candidates in competitive races refusing to concede, and conditional on a refusal the experts give 27 percent to the winner being kept out of office past Jan. 31, 2027.

Here is what I learned. This regime has two of the assets the research found under the dictatorships that lasted, money and an electoral machine that still turns out, and none of the others. Iran has the fused force the durable regimes were born with and used it on Jan. 8; this regime has a coalition, and a coalition is what gave way in Seoul, Kathmandu, Antananarivo and Budapest in the last two years: a parliament that climbed the walls, an army that would not clear the streets, a unit that changed sides, and an electorate that turned out at 79 percent against its own district map.

The regime’s professional forces are the kind that flew Nepal’s prime minister out of his own residence and walked Madagascar’s protesters into the square, and the second force is three years from the street by the estimate of John Sandweg, a former acting ICE director. The rival power centers the regime needs gone are standing: 29 states and the District of Columbia refused the Justice Department their voter rolls this year, and the federal judges who have ruled so far ruled for the states. The leader’s exit, the moment the personalism research finds weakest, is fixed by the Constitution at Jan. 20, 2029.

By the field’s own measures the United States is an autocratization episode in a wealthy democracy, and of those in the last 30 years, 73 percent reversed, most within five years of onset, many after the democracy had broken, and the reversals came through the elections the regime still had to hold. Nov. 3 and November 2028 are that episode’s two elections, and Jan. 20, 2029 is the day the second one has to produce a transfer of power. The elections decide whether the insiders recalculate, the insiders decide whether the regime lasts, and the voters decide the first of those two on Nov. 3 and again in November 2028.

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CALL TO ACTION

Who you are contacting: your governor and your state attorney general.

What you are asking for: a public statement before Nov. 3 that state and local police will enforce state law at every polling place against anyone who interferes with a voter, whether federal agent or private party.

What that is: Several states wrote laws this year barring or limiting troops and federal agents at polling places, and Bellin’s research finds the force that matters is the one that takes the order. Your governor commands your state’s National Guard and, in most states, its state police, and your attorney general is the state’s chief law officer. A statement from both, made before Election Day, tells every sheriff and police chief in the state what to do if an armed agent shows up at a precinct, and tells the agent too. The research also finds participation and a united opposition to be the variables that decide an election like this one, and elite defection to be what ends a regime like this one, so voting on Nov. 3 and bringing the people in your life to the polls with you is the action with the most evidence behind it in a century of data.

How to write it: in your own words. Say who you are, where you live, what you do and why you care, so it never reads as a form letter. In Washington State that is Gov. Bob Ferguson and Attorney General Nick Brown. Everywhere else, find your attorney general here and find your governor here. Email, call, send a free fax through FaxZero, or mail a letter.

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