Los Angeles (DNA) — After the turmoil of recent US election cycles — with a 2024 rematch underway between the oldest presidents in history, one facing multiple indictments — the United States is now being mentioned in the same sentence with systems veering into autocracy by a group of international governance researchers.

Helmut Anheier, principal investigator on the 2024 Berggruen Governance Index (BGI), was discussing the successful democracies that saw their scores for democratic accountability fall during the studied period of 2010-2021. “We are concerned about some countries having significant drops. That includes the United States. It includes Hungary, and Poland dropped,” he said in an interview in Los Angeles.