I arrived in Uganda for my first tour as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer in 2005, just as the country was transitioning to a multi-party political system. President Yoweri Museveni had seized power in 1986 following a guerilla war against the prior government. He led the one-party state (officially a “no-party” system) for nearly two decades until Ugandans, in July 2005, voted overwhelmingly in a referendum to restore multi-party politics. The shift was hailed internationally as a democratic opening, but there were contradictory moves beneath the surface. Museveni had used the referendum as a bargaining chip to push members of parliament (reportedly with large sums of money) to remove presidential term limits from the constitution, a typical authoritarian maneuver. The 1995 constitution included those term limits precisely to prevent the kind of indefinite grip on power that had plagued Uganda through decades of coups and dictatorships, and Museveni himself had identified dictators clinging to power as “one of Africa’s biggest problems” in his 1986 inaugural address. Yet, by 2005, he had engineered the removal of that one provision that would have forced him to leave.
My first assignment in Uganda was to participate on a team conducting a democracy assessment to help USAID develop a country-level democracy development strategy. Over weeks, we interviewed about a hundred leaders from government, civil society, the press, and business. Those interviews made it clear that the ruling party was engaging in undemocratic efforts to stifle the newly legal opposition. We concluded that the country was entering a phase of democratic backsliding, despite the shift to a multi-party political system. Our findings were uncomfortable for some, even within the U.S. Embassy. Many were still praising President Museveni’s leadership and calling Uganda a model country for significantly reducing HIV/AIDS. The then-new Millennium Challenge Corporation was eager to make a large award to the country in recognition of its “good governance.”
Twenty years later, the record speaks for itself: Museveni went on to strip the presidential age limit from the Constitution in 2017 and won a seventh term in January 2026 in an election that the Republican chair of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee called “a hollow exercise, staged to legitimize [the President’s] seventh term and four decades in power.” Freedom House now rates Uganda as “Not Free.” We were right. The democracy assessment was right.
A Framework for Assessing a Country’s Democratic Ecosystem
What made that assessment possible — and its findings credible even when they were unwelcome — was the framework underneath it. The USAID Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance Strategic Assessment Framework is built around a simple insight: the state of a country’s democracy is not determined by a single institution, a single practice, a single policy, or a single leader. It is an ecosystem. Like any ecosystem, its health depends on the vitality of its various components and the quality of the relationships between them.
The traditional democracy assessment framework is organized around five core elements: consensus around national identity and the rules of the political system, the inclusion of citizens in governance systems and processes, political competition and accountability, rule of law, and government responsiveness and effectiveness. Together they capture what a functioning democracy requires not just on paper, but in practice. Do citizens share a basic agreement on the nature of government and the constitutional rules of the game? Are all segments of the population able to participate meaningfully in political and economic life? Is political competition genuinely free and fair, with real mechanisms to hold leaders accountable? Does the rule of law apply equally to everyone, including those in power? Does the government actually deliver for ordinary people?
The ecosystem logic is critical. Think about how air pollution affects not just the air, but the soil, the water, the plants, and the animals. Everything is interconnected. Democratic ecosystems work the same way. When political competition is distorted by gerrymandering and dark money, it weakens legislative oversight. Weakened oversight erodes the rule of law and reduces barriers to corruption. Eroded rule of law corrodes public trust. Each failure makes the others worse. It isn’t possible to fix one piece in isolation and expect the whole system to heal.
This is not just theoretical. When I was in Uganda, our USAID mission director asked a perfectly reasonable question: given limited funds for democracy development, why couldn’t we just focus on the most important piece? The answer came from a body of research that has since grown more robust. In a 2013 article called “Nests of Democracy” in the Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, Dr. Alexander Sokolowski, a long-time leader within USAID’s democracy assistance sector, outlined the complex interdependence among five core institutional spheres of a democratic ecosystem. His conclusion: democracy promotion efforts must build different institutional spheres in a multi-pronged, concurrent way, and they must actively strengthen the connections between them. You can’t just pick one.
A decade later, Josh Lerner, a leader in the U.S. civic space, arrived at the same conclusion from a different direction. Writing in a 2024 white paper “From Waves to Ecosystems”, Lerner argued that the emerging next stage of democratic innovation is about connecting different democratic practices into a balanced, sustainable ecosystem. His summary provides a concise statement that applies to the logic of the democracy assessment framework: “To overcome our crisis of democracy, the only solution is many solutions, connected together.”
The international democracy assistance community and the U.S. civic innovation world independently converged on the same insight: a country’s democratic ecosystem is complex and its parts interdependent. That is exactly the logic we applied when we turned this framework on the United States.
Bringing the Assessment Framework Home to the U.S.
In the early months of 2025, USAID was being dismantled. Programs were shuttered, staff were terminated, and one of the largest international assistance operations in the world was taken apart with stunning speed. It was disorienting in ways that are hard to overstate for the community of professionals who had spent their careers in the international democracy assistance field, developing frameworks and measurement tools, conducting assessments, designing strategies, managing programs, and building relationships. Many of us had dedicated decades to supporting democracy in other countries. Now our institutional home, careers, and field of work were gone, while we watched our country struggle with the same democratic challenges we had tracked elsewhere.
To prevent our community from scattering to the winds, a group of us organized what became the Democracy Renewal Group. Together, we discussed how to pivot our global experience and expertise to support democracy development in our own country. A non-partisan democracy assessment of the United States, using the same framework we had applied for decades in dozens of countries around the world , was an obvious place to start. It was not an academic exercise, but a practical act to provide ourselves — and anyone else who was interested – a deeper understanding of what was happening in the American democratic ecosystem and how to address the systemic weaknesses. Today, we are launching the report of this democracy assessment of the United States. The country-level strategy for democracy development that emerged from the assessment is also being launched today and will be the subject of future articles.
How We Did The Work
This assessment was decidedly different than any we had ever conducted. It was an informal process conducted entirely by volunteers over several months. It was the first time this non-partisan tool was applied to the United States itself. The report was written independently, using artificial intelligence only to help ensure logical flow, and we employed several means to reduce bias, including review by former Republican and Democratic political appointees who served under Presidents George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump.
A plethora of practitioners contributed analysis from their own areas of expertise: electoral systems, rule of law, civil society, media environments, political violence, and governance systems in countries around the world. To build on our analysis, the Democracy Renewal Group hosted a series of virtual workshops in September 2025. In three half-day sessions, we brought the international democracy assistance community together with practitioners in domestic U.S. civil society to address our blind spots and build a shared understanding of the state of our democratic ecosystem.
The response was striking. International development practitioners told us the workshops helped bring them out of the chaos of losing their jobs and gave them a framework for thinking about what to do next. Those who have long been active in the domestic civic space said it helped them grasp the full scope and accelerating pace of our country’s democratic breakdown — not just the headline events, but the structural dynamics underneath them. Following the workshops, Josh Kaufman, a long-time leader in the USAID Democracy Center and former head of USAID’s policy shop, volunteered to synthesize the collective analysis into a full written assessment. The resulting document reflects the combined assessment of dozens of practitioners.
For the U.S. assessment, we kept the original five framework elements and added three more to reflect the current context: political violence, social norms and narrative, and technology and democracy. Until recently, political violence has rarely been part of contemporary discourse about the United States. The events of January 6, 2021, and the documented rise in threats against election workers and public officials made clear it was something we couldn’t ignore. Social norms and narrative matter because democratic decline isn’t only institutional — it’s also cultural. We included the role of technology because the advent of social media, AI, and viral information disorder have played a critical role in the collapse of a shared information environment and trust in governance institutions. The analysis is the product of a team of volunteers and intended to contribute to civic discourse.
During the assessment process, Jerry Hyman, the primary author of the original USAID Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance Strategic Assessment Framework in the 1990s, passed away. We dedicate these innovations and our report of the United States to him.
Why We Did The Work
The assessment has three purposes.
The first is to inform an ecosystem-wide strategy. Without a shared, rigorous understanding of the actual challenges and their root causes, organizations and movements end up working at cross-purposes, treating symptoms rather than root causes or concentrating energy on tasks that appear urgent rather than those that are strategically essential. The assessment is designed to provide a common foundation.
The second is to contribute to the public conversation about the state of American democracy. There is no shortage of commentary. What we produced is something different: a structured diagnosis that gives people working across different parts of the ecosystem a shared language and a shared frame. This is the same kind of diagnostic clarity we provided in Uganda, Hungary, Colombia, and dozens of other countries where we helped to strengthen and defend democracy.
The third purpose is to support those actively working to defend, strengthen, and deepen democracy in the United States: organizers, advocates, researchers, journalists, elected officials, and engaged citizens who need something more systematic than general alarm and a piecemeal understanding to guide their work.
What the Assessment Found – and What We Can Do About It
When we applied this eight-element framework to the United States, the picture that emerged was sobering. The assessment identified deteriorating trends across every element of the democracy assessment framework. The assessment’s three-pillar problem statement is that the exclusion of large segments of the population from meaningful political and economic participation has fed a breakdown in political competition and accountability, as the executive branch has leveraged long-standing grievances and weakened democratic institutions for short-term political gain. Citing the “unitary executive theory”, the executive has also accumulated power at a scale and pace that threatens the constitutional system of checks and balances. The result of those dynamics is a loss of shared agreement on the role of government, the constitutional rules of the game, and the nature of national identity. In the terminology of the USAID assessment framework, the U.S. is now in a consensus crisis.
Ultimately, our democratic decline is structural in nature. The political system in its current state incentivizes narrow political and economic interests over the common good. Gerrymandering, campaign finance distortions, the collapse of the shared information environment, and the long-term exclusion of millions of Americans from meaningful economic and political participation are features of the system itself. These conditions are what led to the current crisis in the first place.
So, what do we do about it? Elections have not reversed a decades-long trend towards deepening political polarization, and elections alone cannot fix what is broken about our system – especially when citizens on both sides of the aisle increasingly view our electoral processes as compromised. The courts have not halted or meaningfully slowed our democratic decline, and they alone cannot fix our system either. Our democratic institutions, which were cutting-edge when they were designed 240 years ago, are now outdated in important ways and unable to meaningfully mediate serious political disputes. Addressing the immediate crisis while also confronting its deeper roots will require a coordinated, long-term strategy for robust structural and other reforms across civil society, government, and the private sector in order to renew our system of self-governance for the country’s next chapter.
Beyond the structural reforms themselves, the way we undertake them is critical. Partisan proposals without the broad consent and support of a cross-partisan swath of Americans will only contribute to the continuation of our toxic zero-sum political processes. The institutional changes American democracy needs and the broad coalitions most of them would require can only be built by bringing people together across our very real and deep divides. The work of democratic renewal has to be, from the beginning, a project of bridge-building and consensus building as much as mobilization and advocacy. We have to find our way back to enough shared ground that, together, the American people can identify the reforms we need, build the political will to pass them, and implement them in ways that a broad majority recognizes as legitimate. This critical moment in our country’s history would be a great time to cultivate a culture of deliberative democracy so that Americans can work through our challenges and come up with solutions together.
The ecosystem framework tells us that we can’t fix one piece of our system in isolation, and no one group can do it alone. The only solution is many solutions, intentionally connected together, and pursued by a democracy renewal movement broad and powerful enough to actually deliver them. We look forward to undertaking this work together with all those committed to building a more inclusive, deliberative, responsive, and accountable system of self-governance in the U.S. in the wake of the current crisis.
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In future posts, we will go deeper on the democracy assessment’s key findings and introduce the country-level democracy strategy that emerged from the assessment process.
Danielle M. Reiff is a retired American diplomat, peacebuilder, and the editor of Overcoming Information Chaos: A Guide to Cultivating Peaceful Communities in the Digital Age. Her writing has appeared in Newsweek, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, The Peace Guidebook, and other publications. As a U.S. diplomat for twenty years, Danielle specialized in supporting democratic transitions and peacebuilding around the world. After retiring, she founded the non-partisan Peacebuilders initiative to promote nonviolent approaches to complex social and political reform. She co-founded the Democracy Renewal Group and co-led the democracy assessment and strategy process for the U.S. Danielle earned a graduate degree in International Relations and Peace from Sciences Po in Paris as part of the first ever cadre of Rotary Peace Fellows. In 2025, she earned an executive certificate in public leadership from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She was a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in Burkina Faso from 1998-2000. Check out Danielle M. Reiff’s Substack.
Danielle,
This resonates for me on a visceral level.
I've spent a career in actual ecosystems — soils, forests, and watersheds — and the thing you learn standing in them is the thing this assessment insists on:
You cannot heal one part in isolation.
Damage the soil and the water knows.
Distort political competition and the rule of law knows.
Interdependence isn't a metaphor to reach for; it's the structure by which living systems hold together or come apart.
What moves me most is your insistence that renewal has to be bridge-building from the very first step — not after we've already won the argument. That's patient, un-flashy work, and it's the only kind that takes root. Thank you for turning these tools on ourselves. So glad this exists, and so glad to know you.
We had the joy of hosting Danielle on Wickedly Smart and Woefully Stupid a few months back, and her clarity about democracy as a living system echoed in our hearts and minds long after the mics went off.
This piece is that clarity put to real work in the world.
"The only solution is many solutions, connected together" is exactly the kind of idea we keep circling — that the "wickedly smart" move and the humble move are usually the same one: don't pretend any single fix saves the system.
Congratulations, Danielle. Grateful this assessment is out in the world, and grateful to know the people behind it.
— Wendy & Harvey