US Democracy Trends - Monthly Trendline
RealTime DemTrends tracks US democratic vitality across 39 factors, organized into 13 dimensions, every week. This monthly trendline dashboard aggregates the average factor scores by dimension and month. The chart shows how each of the 13 democratic dimensions has trended month by month, scored on a scale from −3 (Significant Concern) to +3 (Significant Progress). Each colored line represents one dimension.
to explore factor scores and
story clusters for that month.
Filtering the chart
The row of buttons above the chart lists all 13 dimensions. By default, all are shown. Click any button to toggle that dimension on or off — you can select as many or as few as you like. This is useful if you want to compare a handful of related dimensions side by side, or focus on the ones most relevant to a particular event or issue you're tracking. Clicking All brings every dimension back at once.
Hovering over a data point
Hovering over any dot on the chart opens a popup tooltip showing the month, the dimension's average score for that month, and a breakdown of the individual factor scores that make up that average. This lets you see at a glance which factors were driving a dimension's rating up or down.
Clicking a data point
Clicking any dot opens the detail panel on the right side. This is where the deeper analysis lives. The panel shows:
The dimension's overall score for that month and what it signals (e.g., "Moderate Concern")
An AI-generated summary of what happened that month drawn from the weekly analyses
A card for each of the 2–3 factors that make up that dimension
Each factor card shows the factor's monthly average score, a horizontal bar visualizing the direction and magnitude, and a selection of the most relevant news headlines from that period with the week they were published
Navigating across months
To explore a different month for the same dimension, simply click a different dot on that dimension's line. The detail panel will update with the relevant news articles from the selected timeframe. This makes it easy to trace how a situation developed over time — for example, clicking successive months along a declining line to understand the sequence of events that drove the trend.
Important notes for interpretation
Scoring: Each factor is scored weekly on a −3 to +3 scale, initially by AI based on hypothetical scenarios drawn from instances of democratic erosion observed around the world and then by a human review panel. The monthly figure shown in this dashboard is the calculated average of all weekly scores within that month aggregated by dimension. A score near zero can signal stability, limited coverage across the news media sources, or the existence of competing positive and negative signals that cancel out.
Narrative Summaries: All monthly narrative summaries are AI generated pulling from the long-form weekly analyses on Substack, a necessary measure given the volume of data processed. This means that the summaries may overstate the importance of particular events, and it may even mischaracterize some details. When in doubt, look at the news articles themselves or go back to the long-form, human-reviewed weekly write-ups on Substack.