Recognizable Patterns, as of July 2026
Political scientists who study how democracies have weakened elsewhere (Hungary, Russia, Turkey, Venezuela) describe a consistent set of tactics, though no two countries follow the same path. No single action proves a country is becoming authoritarian. What researchers watch for is the shape: incremental changes that seem individually defensible, but accumulate over time into a serious erosion of democratic checks.
This overview lays out the six categories most commonly cited, with an example of each and where the pattern is apparent in current U.S. government actions.
See also: Threats to Voting Rights & Privacy for how these tactics are showing up specifically in threats to voting rights.
1. Institutional Capture
Packing courts, electoral commissions, and prosecutorial offices with loyalists; rewriting constitutions or electoral rules to entrench incumbent advantage; using legitimate-seeming legislation to systematically erode checks — all rather than via any single dramatic act.
International example: Hungary’s Fidesz party rewrote the constitution and packed the constitutional court after winning a supermajority in 2010, thus entrenching its advantage well beyond any single election
U.S. pattern to watch: Federal collection of state voter rolls (sensitive personal data, and an unprecedented encroachment on states’ constitutional authority over elections) and the replacement of career election-security officials with appointees tied to the “election-denial” movement. See Threats to Voting Rights & Privacy for full detail. [see End Note 1]
2. Media and Information Control
Buying up or pressuring independent media into loyalist ownership; starving critical outlets of advertising or state contracts while channeling resources to friendly outlets; flooding the information space with pro-government content to drown out independent reporting.
International example: Russian state media consolidation under Putin has left almost no major independent national broadcaster, making it difficult for most Russians to encounter dissenting coverage of the government.
U.S. pattern to watch: CBS’s parent company paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit widely seen as tied to securing approval for a pending merger; NPR and PBS lost federal funding by executive order (a federal judge later ruled this unconstitutional); and the FCC has used the “equal time” rule to pressure a late-night show over an appearance by a Democratic Senate candidate. Watchdog groups describe this as regulatory leverage being used to shape news coverage. [see End Note 2]
3. Weakening Civil Society and Opposition
Labeling NGOs [see End Note 3], journalists, or opposition parties as “foreign agents” or security threats in order to justify restrictions; selective, technically-legal prosecution of opposition figures (via tax charges, licensing violations) rather than overt political persecution; new funding or registration requirements designed to squeeze independent organizations.
International example: Russia’s “foreign agent” law, expanded repeatedly since 2012, has been used to label independent media, human rights groups, and individual journalists as agents of foreign influence, restricting their operations and discouraging public association with them.
U.S. pattern to watch: Executive orders stripped several major law firms of security clearances, barred employees from federal buildings, and cancelled federal contracts — retaliation for representing clients or causes the administration opposed. Courts have ruled multiple of these orders unconstitutional. Separately, the administration has threatened to revoke the tax-exempt status of Harvard University and watchdog nonprofits by name, including the ethics group CREW. [see End Note 3]
4. Elections That Are Technically Held but Substantively Unfair
Tactics include uneven media access, resource asymmetry, and administrative harassment of challengers, as well as redrawing districts or changing voting rules to structurally favor the incumbent. Meanwhile, the vote count itself is largely accurate.
International example: Turkey continues to hold competitive elections, but jailed opposition candidates, state-dominated media coverage, and pressure on independent election monitors have made the playing field steadily less fair over time.
U.S. pattern to watch: This is the category most directly explored in Threats to Voting Rights — new state laws, the SAVE Act, and the mail-in voting executive order all add cost and time burdens that fall unevenly on specific groups of voters, even without touching the vote count itself. [see End Note 4]
5. Personalization of Power and Loyalty Over Competence
Concentrating power in the executive and sidelining independent agencies; appointing loyalists rather than technocrats to key institutions (military, security services, central bank, prosecutors); rewarding personal loyalty even when it means overlooking lawbreaking.
International example: In Russia, key security and judicial appointments have consistently gone to individuals with personal ties to Putin rather than independent technocrats, ensuring loyalty runs to the person rather than the institution.
U.S. pattern to watch: Several cabinet and agency appointments have prioritized personal loyalty over conventional qualifications: the Secretary of Defense had previously led only a 200-person National Guard unit; the FBI Director had no senior law-enforcement experience; and the health secretary had no background in public health administration. Analysts note this reverses the usual practice of balancing loyalty with expertise. [see End Note 5]
U.S. example — The January 6th & Election-Subversion Pardons: On his first day back in office, roughly 1,500 people connected to the Jan. 6 attack were pardoned by Trump. In Nov. 2025, pardons extended further — to Rudy Giuliani and others behind the “fake electors” scheme, an attempt to replace state electors with false results. Watchdog groups argue the pattern isn’t about forgiveness: it is about rewarding personal loyalty to the president over adherence to the law, sending a clear signal that breaking the law on his behalf will be protected — not punished. That dynamic, more than any single pardon, is what election-law experts flag as a warning sign of authoritarian governance. [Brennan Center: Pardoning Jan. 6 Insurrectionists Would Endorse Attacks on Democracy]
6. Normalizing Incremental Erosion
Each individual step is often defensible in isolation — framed as efficiency, security, or fighting corruption — which makes the cumulative erosion harder to resist or even notice in real time. This is the pattern scholars Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt emphasize in How Democracies Die: democratic backsliding today rarely looks like a coup. It looks like a series of individually plausible legal and administrative changes. [See End Note 6 for a list of authors who have documented this].
International example: Venezuela under Chávez and later Maduro saw powers concentrated gradually over more than a decade — each step (a new decree, a court ruling, an election-law tweak) defensible on its own terms — rather than through any single dramatic seizure of power.
U.S. pattern to watch: This category describes the shape of the overall pattern rather than one specific action. Each item above — voter data collection, media pressure, law firm and nonprofit targeting, loyalty-based appointments — was defended individually as routine, lawful, or necessary. What researchers watch for isn’t any single action — it’s how quickly, and how many, such actions accumulate.
A note on how we use this framework:
No two countries’ paths to democratic backsliding are identical, and the institutions and histories of Hungary, Russia, and America differ substantially. Scholars disagree on how far any single comparison extends. This overview isn’t a claim that the U.S. is following any one country’s exact path. Rather, it’s a lens for recognizing a pattern, so that individually “reasonable-sounding” changes can be evaluated in context rather than in isolation.
This framework draws on a pattern researchers have identified across multiple countries, but how far it generalizes is genuinely debated. Each country’s path is also shaped by its own distinct history and institutions. Hungary’s trajectory, for instance, was shaped in part by the constraints (and levers) of European Union membership, quite different from Russia’s post-Soviet security-state legacy. This overview offers a lens for recognizing a pattern, not a claim that the U.S. is following any single country’s exact path.
End Note 1: Sources on voter data collection and personnel changes (full detail in Threats to Voting Rights) — Brennan Center: Tracker — DOJ Requests for Voter Information | ProPublica: Full report on election-security personnel changes
End Note 2: Sources on media pressure — CAP: The Trump Administration and the FCC Are Weakening Freedom of the Press | Reuters Institute: United States, Digital News Report 2026 | PEN America: Troubling Escalation in Pressure and Threats Against Media
End Note 3: NGO stands for Non-Governmental Organization — a nonprofit, citizen-based group that operates independently of any government, typically working on social, humanitarian, environmental, human rights, or advocacy causes. NGOs range in scale, from small local nonprofits — like Indivisibles — to massive international organizations (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders). They are usually funded by donations, grants or membership dues rather than government budgets. In the context of category 3 (Weakening Civil Society and Opposition), NGOs matter because they’re often among the first targets when a government wants to reduce independent scrutiny. Labeling them “foreign agents” and subjecting them to onerous registration/funding rules are common tactics precisely because NGOs — such as human rights monitors, election observers, and investigative journalism nonprofits — are usually among the few remaining checks once media and courts are compromised. For sources on law firms and nonprofit tax-exempt status: NPR: Judge strikes down Trump executive order targeting Perkins Coie | Chronicle of Philanthropy: Law Firms, Universities, and Now Civil Society Groups Are in Trump’s Sights
End Note 4: Sources on state voting laws and the SAVE Act (full detail in Threats to Voting Rights) — Brennan Center: Full State Voting Laws Roundup | Vote.org: About the SAVE Act
End Note 5: Sources on loyalty-based appointments — The Hill: Trump’s Unqualified Appointees Draw Criticism | Brookings: Assessing President Trump’s second-term staffing record
End Note 6: Recent writers/publications that document this progression include Timothy Snyder in On Tyranny, On Freedom, and 20 Lessons on Tyranny; Heather Cox Richardson in Democracy Awakening and on Substack; Anne Applebaum in Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism; and writings by Bernie Sanders, Masha Gessen, Osita Nwanevu, and others.