Bright Line Watch is a project run by a group of political scientists that monitors the health of American democracy in near-real time, focused on the specific "bright lines" that separate democratic from undemocratic government.
Its method is distinctive: recurring surveys of both a large panel of political-science experts and the general public, asking how well the U.S. is living up to concrete democratic principles—free and fair elections, checks on executive power, equal treatment under law—and where performance is slipping.
The result is a running, quantified read on U.S. democratic performance, issued as regular reports that capture how expert and public assessments shift with events, and where the two diverge from each other.
It complements the historical sweep of datasets like V-Dem with something timely and specifically American: a periodic check-up on the very institutions and norms this tracker follows day to day.