that many Americans do not trust their government and do not believe our democracy is working. Young people in record numbers feel pessimism, not hope, about the future. America’s democracy is not the only one under strain. The global order that emerged from the Second World War, led largely by the United States, allowed for an unprecedented 80 years of relative global peace and an increase in the number of electoral democracies in the world until 2000. In fact, a significant goal of U.S. foreign policy after that war was the promotion of democracy as the best form of government under the timetested theory that democracies are far less likely to go to war with one another and more likely to have strong economies and lower corruption, allowing for greater stability and global prosperity. But for the past two decades, the world has found itself in a “democratic recession,” as Freedom House has termed it, in which the world’s democracies have steadily declined in number and the health of the remaining democracies has deteriorated. While democracy has been on its back foot, autocracy and “competitive authoritarianism” have enjoyed a period of expansion. These trends are blamed, in no small part, on the internet, social media, and the foreign malign influence campaigns with which authoritarian regimes control and interfere with the global information ecosystem. Today, less than one-fifth of the world lives in a country that Freedom House would define as “free.” Competitive Authoritarianism on the Rise “Competitive authoritarianism,” a term coined by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way in 2002, describes a hybrid government in which leaders gain power through elections but then erode the established systems of checks and balances of their democracies to enhance their own power. It is recognizable to U.S. diplomats who have served in countries experiencing it and involves a familiar pattern: Leaders of competitive authoritarian countries attack the systems and sources of information that they fear may weaken their hold on power. They attack the free press, free speech, universities and academics, the judiciary, and, importantly, nonpartisan career public servants, because each of these is a mechanism of accountability. Competitive authoritarians fear open and transparent information flow because they seek to conduct themselves without checks on their power by a well-informed citizenry. In fact, it is this very hubris and feature of authoritarianism—that its leaders decimate the sources of information that might help them avoid perilous errors of judgment—that has led to the eventual downfall of most such governments. Once a healthy democracy descends into competitive authoritarianism, it is not doomed to that fate. Today, in countries such as Poland, Brazil, and now potentially Hungary following its recent elections, we have seen an engaged citizenry reverse some of the harm done to democratic institutions. But these reversals are hard fought and tenuous. Another feature of competitive authoritarianism that gives it its signature “frog in boiling water” feel is that citizens begin either to fear acting in defense of their democratic institutions lest they be singled out by authoritarian leaders or to feel apathy if they perceive that the harm to their democratic institutions is irreversible. This makes turning the authoritarian tide even more difficult. However, democracies must reckon with another uncomfortable fact: Strongman regimes may be on the rise because of the inherent challenges that democracy faced in trying to THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2026 21 President Abraham Lincoln urges Americans to devote themselves wholeheartedly to the “unfinished work” of preserving the “new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” in his famous address at the consecration of the Gettysburg National Cemetery on November 19, 1863. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
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