Bright Line Watch, a multi-university initiative to monitor democratic practices, their resilience, and potential threats housed at the Chicago Center on Democracy, has released the latest update to its ongoing measurement of the state of U.S. democracy.
In March 2019, Bright Line Watch fielded its eighth survey of academic experts and sixth survey of the general public. Since the group began these surveys in 2017, assessments of U.S. democratic performance had generally declined among both groups. The March 2019 surveys, the first since the 2018 midterm elections, identified a substantial reversal of that trend (albeit one that may already be eroding, as the survey was conducted prior to the release of the Mueller report and subsequent escalation of conflict between the executive and legislative branches).
This survey also includes Bright Line Watch’s first expert ratings of the quality of democracy at the level of state government.
For more detail on the results of the survey, read the report here.