Resolution criteria

This market will resolve to YES if, at any point before January 1, 2400, the United States of America is established as a dictatorship, autocracy, or absolute authoritarian regime.

To resolve to YES, the transition must meet at least one of the following conditions for a continuous period of at least 3 years:

• Constitutional and Institutional Collapse: The formal suspension, dissolution, or permanent alteration of the US Constitution such that competitive, free, and fair multi-party national elections are abolished, and supreme executive, legislative, and judicial power is officially concentrated in a single ruler (dictator), military junta, or ruling single-party committee.

• Quantitative Political Science Metrics: Major international databases tracking governance—such as the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project (Regimes of the World class 0: Closed Autocracy), the Center for Systemic Peace Polity Project (Polity score of -6 to -10), or widely accepted academic successor indices—officially classify the United States as a closed autocracy or dictatorship.

• Historical Consensus: In the event that quantitative indices or formal constitutions no longer exist or are unmeasurable, an overwhelming consensus (greater than 80%) among mainstream, independent international historians and political scientists that the United States operated as a dictatorship.

The market will resolve to NO if:

• On January 1, 2400, the United States has never met the criteria for a dictatorship since the market's creation.

• The United States ceases to exist as a unified sovereign nation-state (e.g., via peaceful dissolution, secession, or foreign conquest) before ever transitioning into a dictatorship. If a successor state claiming to be the sole legal continuation of the United States is established and ruled as a dictatorship, this will still resolve the market to YES.

Background

The United States has functioned as a constitutional republic and representative democracy since the ratification of its Constitution in 1788. While it has experienced periods of intense political polarization, civil war, and institutional stress, it has avoided autocratic rule.

Long-term political datasets, such as the Polity Project and V-Dem, track the strength of democratic institutions globally. For instance, the Polity5 dataset briefly downgraded the United States' score from a "consolidated democracy" (+10) to an "anocracy" (+5) in late 2020 following election-related instability, before restoring it to a democracy (+8) in 2021, and later noting transitional characteristics following legal shifts in executive immunity in 2024. This market asks whether existential institutional backsliding will eventually culminate in a full dictatorship over the next four centuries.