Monitoring democratic institutions through public records
About Democracy Monitor
“I joked that if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it took down a presidency is crazy.”
Joke or not, the half-life of news touching on democracy in America is now measured in hours. This project exists to measure and hold onto what the news cycle no longer can.
What this site is
The news and commentary are full of warnings about the decline of democracy in America and the rise of authoritarianism. This site does not take a stand on that question.
What it does instead is narrower, and checkable: it reads what the government says about itself — executive orders, Federal Register rules, court opinions, agency press releases, inspector-general reports, congressional records — and asks whether those documents indicate erosion of 14 pillars of classic American democracy. The same methodology is applied to every administration, and every assessment links to the documents behind it.
Whether erosion of democracy in America is underway is not this site's call to make — it is for the American people to decide, from the evidence, which is all public and all downloadable.
Is any of it at the level of the high crimes and misdemeanors Nixon was accused of? That is a question the Constitution assigns to Congress, not to a website.
Who is behind this
Democracy Monitor is built and run by one person: a semi-retired software engineer who had an idea about putting AI to work in a way that might serve the public good. It is not backed by a party, a campaign, or an advocacy organization. The code, the methodology, and the data are all open — read the source, download the data, check the work, and tell me where it's wrong.