The United States is an ‘Anocracy’

‘How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them’ by Barbara F. Walter

Barbara F. Walter’s new book How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them discusses the polity score used by the Polity Project at the Center for Systemic Peace. That index runs on “a fully autocratic to fully democratic scale of –10 to +10.”

Countries in the middle range of –5 to +5 are “anocratic.” That’s an academic neologism for Welp with a capital W. It means the country is neither-autocratic-nor-democratic.