Instead of wringing my hands about world events or falling into an echo chamber, I built a simple model called the Autocracy Pressure Index (API), because the most dangerous political changes rarely announce themselves. Democracies don’t usually collapse by coup. They deform under load.
API is a structural model, not a moral judgment and not a prediction. It doesn’t ask whether a country is authoritarian. It asks how much pressure is being applied to democratic norms at a given moment—and whether the system is operating in an elastic, plastic, or failure-prone regime.
Think of it like material science. You don’t wait for a bridge to snap before measuring stress. You measure strain, microfractures, and fatigue long before catastrophic failure.
API aggregates eight variables, each scored from 0–10 and averaged:
F – Press & speech freedom
I – Institutional independence (courts, civil service, regulators)
C – Civil society & assembly
R – Repression and coercive capacity
M – Electoral manipulation & democratic façade
S – Surveillance & security infrastructure
E – Executive power concentration & immunity
K – Knowledge integrity (disinformation, epistemic collapse)
Some of these measure capacity (surveillance, repression). Others measure activation (use of that capacity). The distinction matters. A high-capacity system can remain democratic—until incentives shift.
API is deliberately agnostic about who holds office. It tracks incentives, tolerance for norm-breaking, and whether shortcuts become politically rewarding. That’s why it rises after 9/11 even under bipartisan consensus, and why it continues climbing after 2016 regardless of election outcomes.
Crucially, K—knowledge integrity—is a multiplier, not just another input. Once shared reality fractures, every other variable becomes harder to constrain. Courts lose legitimacy. Elections become suspect. Emergency powers linger. Nothing dramatic has to happen for pressure to rise.
To keep the model honest, API is calibrated against external democracy datasets like V-Dem Institute and Freedom House. Those datasets track rights and constraints; API translates their slow-moving signals into a stress profile focused on trajectory, not labels.
Interpretation matters:
3–5 → plastic: deformation accumulates
5–7 → microfractures propagate
8+ → brittle failure likely
The United States today sits in the plastic range. Institutions still function. Elections still occur. But the tolerance for coercive shortcuts is higher than it was—and rising pressure has a memory.
API doesn’t tell us what will happen. It tells us what kind of system we’re asking democracy to be under stress—and whether that stress is becoming normal.
