The United States has long prided itself on being the longest-running "democracy" in the world. Of course, there has always been a debate: since the United States has a history of lack of universal suffrage (slavery, Jim Crow laws, systematic exclusion of minorities from voting, etc.) In a sense, can the history of the United States until recently be regarded as the history of a "democratic country"?
Even if we ignore all of this, a global data series called "Polity" has stripped the United States of its age-old title of "Democracy." This often-cited CIA-funded data series measures other countries quantitatively from "complete dictatorship" to "complete democracy."
The "Polity" data series is one of three data series widely used in American political science and polling research. It is maintained by the Political Instability Task Force established and funded by the CIA.
A recent analysis of the "Political" data series by the Center for American System Peace shows that the United States is now a nation of no-domination regimes, sometimes referred to as "illiberal democracies" or "mixed regimes" (partly "democracy" , partly "dictatorial". Quantitatively, a country with a non-dominant system is in the middle of a digital scale with “complete dictatorship” at one end and “complete democracy” at the other end.