A long time ago, in a Congress far, far away…
When democracies backslide, scholars argue over which institution gave way first: an overreaching executive or a stalled legislature. This project builds a new measure of how strongly Congress constrains the president and takes a first test: which one tracks the decline in U.S. democracy?
In 2025, 238 executive orders were signed, 225 of them by President Trump. That is more than in 2017 through 2020 combined and the most in any year since 1942. That same year, the U.S. liberal democracy score fell to 0.571, its lowest point in 35 years.
Which mechanism tracks democratic erosion?
Episode VII · The full index
The Congressional Institutional Strength Index (CISI) will measure how strongly Congress constrains the president across five components. This preliminary test used two of them.
These preliminary results favor executive aggrandizement over legislative gridlock as the more salient mechanism of democratic erosion in the contemporary U.S.
Tested · p = 0.003
A reliable negative predictor of liberal democracy.
Tested · p = 0.901
No independent effect once executive orders are in the model.
Next
How often Congress calls the executive branch to account.
Next
Congress’s hold on the power of the purse.
Next
How the Senate uses its advice-and-consent power.
Future work adds the remaining three components and tests data-driven weights, such as principal component analysis, instead of an equal-weight average.
Your turn at the controls
Drag the slider to see each year’s numbers side by side.