The Democratic Erosion Consortium (DEC) presented its new U.S. Democratic Erosion Events Dataset (US-DEED) at the 2026 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA), as part of the panel “Innovative Approaches to Measuring Regime Change.”
DEC Research Director Julie Anne Weaver presented the new dataset alongside Jessica Gottlieb, Kirill Chmel, and other DEC colleagues. US-DEED adapts DEC’s cross-national Democratic Erosion Events Dataset (DEED) framework to the U.S. context, providing a systematic way to track both democratic erosion and resistance to it.
The U.S. version of the dataset also introduces new variables designed to capture partisan polarization in the interpretation of democratic events. In addition, US-DEED uses an automated data-generation pipeline with human validation at every step, combining computational approaches with expert review.
DEC is grateful to the panel organizers and participants, including Semuhi Sinanoğlu, Julia Leininger, and Benjamin Yoel, for the opportunity to contribute to this discussion.
Learn more about DEC’s cross-national DEED dataset.
Interested in learning more about US-DEED? Contact the Democratic Erosion Consortium for updates on the project and its forthcoming data resources.