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 in

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