The slide from democracy to authoritarianism is often subtle, gradual, and driven from within. The newly launched Tyranny Tracker is a sophisticated tool for classifying political regimes across the spectrum.
Democracy around the world is increasingly undermined not by sudden coups or overt constitutional breakdowns, but by incremental, executive-led measures that hollow out democratic institutions while preserving the veneer of democracy. Courts are packed or pressured, opposition voices are legally harassed rather than outright banned, and electoral competition is tilted just enough to make alternation in power unlikely. Existing democracy indexes, which often aggregate diverse indicators into quantitative composite scores, can struggle to capture the moment when democracies breakdown, sliding into hybrid or fully authoritarian systems. To that end, the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) is launching the Tyranny Tracker.
Regime classification in an era of democratic backsliding requires close attention to executive-led erosion and, above all, to the judiciaryтАЩs capacity to function as an effective check on abuses of power. By moving away from aggregated numerical scores and toward qualitative thresholds, the Tyranny Tracker seeks to distinguish more clearly between democracies under pressure and those that have devolved into hybrid authoritarian regimes.
