The president of the United States is deploying masked troops to the streets of blue cities, working to put friendly billionaires in charge of the media environment, and attempting to jail his personal enemies.

Can any democracy come back from this?

Earlier this year, two teams of researchers published papers trying to answer this exact question — and came to seemingly opposite conclusions.

Both papers focused on what they call “democratic U-turns:” where a country starts out as a democracy, moves toward authoritarianism, and then quickly recovers. The first team’s conclusions were optimistic: they identified 102 U-turn cases since 1900 and found that, in 90 percent of them, the result was “restored or even improved levels of democracy.” The second team focused on 21 recent cases and inverted the findings — concluding that “nearly 90 percent” of alleged U-turns were short-lived mirages.

So who’s right? To find out, I reexamined the basic data and spoke to researchers from each of the two teams. It turns out that the seemingly opposed findings are actually more consistent than they seem — with implications for the United States that are at once hopeful and disturbing.

What researchers learned about “democratic U-turns”

The scholarly research on U-turns draws from a database called V-Dem, widely considered the gold standard for quantitative research on global democracy. V-Dem works by getting a broad group of experts on individual countries to give numerical assessments of different aspects of that country’s democracy (e.g., how free the press is, or whether elections are administered impartially). These judgements are turned into composite scores that assess how democratic a country is as a whole.

The first team of researchers, the more optimistic ones, are based at the institute that compiles and publishes the V-Dem database. Looking over their own data, authors Marina Nord, Fabio Angiolillo,

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