Political science of civil war in the U.S.

Precipitating factors

Anocracy, also known as hybrid democracy, is a form of government that's part democracy and part autocracy (an autocracy is similar to a dictatorship).

Anocracies are much more likely to lead to violence, however there isn't yet scholarly consensus about whether anoncacy is more likely to lead to civil war.

Other theories of what can precede a civil war — greed, grievance, and opportunities.

Measures of democracy

• V-Dem Institute (Varieties of Democracy)
  • One way to view the data is to go to the country graph, then on the left select United States, then under "V-Dem Indicies", select the first five indicies. (apologies that I wasn't able to find a way to bookmark a specific chart)
• World Justice Project's Rule of Law Index
  • their entry for the United States
• Democracy Index, compiled by the UK company "Economist Group" (last updated 2020)
• Democracy-Dictatorship Index (last updated 2008)

Have mentions of the term "civil war" actually increased lately?

• Google Trends — maybe? ("What is Google Trends?")
• Google Books Ngram Viewer — maaaaaybe? ("What is Google Books Ngram Viewer?")
• list of polls
  • (TODO — is there some resource on the web that keeps track of this list, so I don't have to?)
  • 2022-10-13, by The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
  • 2022-08-26, by the Economist and YouGov
  • 2022-07-19, by the University of California Davis Violence Prevention Research Program and the California Firearm Violence Research Center
  • 2021-02-04, by John Zogby

(TODO — Maybe use the NOW Corpus ("News on the Web") (or maybe the "Unified Representation of Twitter and Online News" data is available?) to graph the frequency of use of "civil war" since 2008)