For most of our lives, Americans have been taught a simple story about our government: we live in a democracy. We vote. We have rights. The Constitution protects us. The system, whatever its flaws, is fundamentally free.
A growing number of political scientists say that story no longer fits. They argue the United States has crossed a line into something different: a system called competitive authoritarianism.
It’s a clunky academic phrase, but the idea behind it is straightforward and worth understanding, because it changes how we think about elections, protests, courts, and the road ahead.
Recently, several articles have come out about a “new” system of government in the U.S. The New Yorker published “How Bad is it? Three Political Scientists Say America is No Longer a Democracy.” From NPR: “Is the U.S. Slipping Into Competitive Authoritarianism?”
I’ve never heard the term before, but since Political Scientists are debating our country’s shift from democracy to this new system of government, I’m writing this explainer for anyone else who may not be certain what it means.
What the Term Actually Means
Competitive authoritarianism describes a system that appears to be a democracy from the outside. Elections happen. Opposition parties exist. Newspapers publish. Critics speak. But behind the scenes, the party in power uses the machinery of government to bend the rules in its favor and punish anyone who pushes back.
The term was coined in 2002 by political scientists Steven Levitsky of Harvard and Lucan Way of the University of Toronto. They created it to describe countries like Serbia under Slobodan Milošević, Peru under Alberto Fujimori, Hungary under Viktor Orbán, and Kenya under Daniel arap Moi. As Levitsky has explained, the men running these systems never set out to call themselves dictators. They held elections. They just made sure they could not lose.
Levitsky has said plainly that when he and Way coined the term a quarter-century ago, they never imagined applying it to the United States.
How it Works in Practice
The defining move of a competitive authoritarian leader is to take institutions that are supposed to be neutral — the courts, the Justice Department, the tax agency, the federal regulators — and turn them into political tools. Levitsky has described it as converting the state into “a weapon and a shield”: a weapon against opponents, and a shield protecting the ruler’s allies from accountability.
In practice, the playbook looks something like this:
- Investigate and prosecute political rivals and critics. (check)
- File lawsuits against news organizations that report unflattering stories. (check)
- Pressure universities, law firms, and nonprofits seen as opposition strongholds. (check)
- Strip licenses, contracts, or funding from companies and broadcasters that step out of line. (check)
- Reshape election rules, voter rolls, and oversight bodies to favor the ruling party. (CHECK)
Elections still happen. Opposition candidates still appear on the ballot. But the playing field has been tilted so steeply that real competition becomes very difficult.
Why Scholars Are Applying the Label to the U.S. Now
Since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, the term has spread rapidly. Levitsky has pointed to specific patterns that pushed him to apply the label to America: the Justice Department targeting public critics of the president, lawsuits aimed at media outlets, and pressure campaigns against universities viewed as critical of the administration.
Other signals scholars cite include threats to broadcast licenses, the use of federal agencies against perceived enemies, mass federal workforce purges replacing career civil servants with loyalists, the deployment of immigration enforcement as a political tool, and the administration’s open hostility toward judges who rule against it.
Trump himself has dismissed the framing. Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office last August, he said some people had told him they liked the idea of a dictator, before adding that he is not one.
Not every scholar agrees with the label. Some argue the United States retains too many guardrails — federalism, independent state governments, a still-functioning court system in many places — to fit the definition. The debate among experts is active and ongoing.
What do you think? Are there still “too many guardrails” remaining for our system of government to be labeled competitive authoritarianism? The scholars didn’t mention the Republicans’ voter suppression shenanigans currently taking place in red states, and without the “checks and balances” that are supposed to be the “guardrails” on this administration, I’m not sure about the view of experts on the other side of this debate.
What This Means for the Rest of Us
The most important thing to understand about competitive authoritarianism is also the most hopeful: it is not the same as dictatorship, and it is not permanent.
Look at Hungary. Viktor Orbán spent sixteen years perfecting this exact playbook and was widely considered the model that aspiring strongman, Donald Trump, studied. Last month, a unified opposition defeated his party in a landslide. A struggling economy and widespread corruption finally caught up with him.
Competitive authoritarian systems can be voted out. But it is harder than under a normal democracy. It requires an opposition that unites instead of splintering, voters who keep showing up even when the deck feels stacked, journalists who keep reporting under pressure, and ordinary people who refuse to be intimidated into silence.
That is the situation many scholars now believe Americans are living in. Not a closed dictatorship. Not the democracy we were promised. Something in between — and something that can still go either direction, depending on what we do next.
