The president, who serves as both head of state and head of government, is elected for up to two four-year terms. Presidential elections are decided by an Electoral College, with electors apportioned to each state based on the size of its congressional representation. In most cases, all of the electors in a particular state cast their ballots for the candidate who won the statewide popular vote, regardless of the margin. Two states, Maine and Nebraska, have chosen to divide their electoral votes between the candidates based on their popular-vote performance in each congressional district.

In the 2020 election, Biden, the Democratic Party nominee, won 306 Electoral College votes, leaving Trump, the Republican incumbent, with 232. Biden defeated Trump by more than seven million votes, or approximately 4.4 percentage points, in the national popular balloting. Turnout was the highest recorded in more than a century, with roughly two-thirds of the eligible population casting a ballot.

The COVID-19 pandemic compelled many states to increase access to early and mail-in voting, partly to help prevent dangerous crowding at polling sites. This led to a series of legal battles, with the Trump campaign and other Republican litigants generally arguing against the changes and claiming that they would open the door to fraud. The balloting itself unfolded with few significant disruptions. Meanwhile, the federal government assisted states in safeguarding ballots and computer networks against foreign and other illegal interference, while social media companies made greater efforts to thwart election-related disinformation campaigns by foreign actors on their platforms. These measures were generally deemed successful.

In the weeks after the election, Trump refused to concede, continued to allege fraud, and openly pressured election officials in pivotal states to make decisions that would support his claims regardless of the facts and the law. Election workers in some states reported intimidation and death threats. A raft of lawsuits by the Trump campaign and its allies were dismissed by state and federal courts, but many Republicans and Trump supporters were persuaded that voter fraud was widespread and Biden was not the rightful winner.

Trump and his allies attempted to involve the Justice Department and other government agencies in supporting the president’s fraud claims, to enlist then vice president Mike Pence in blocking certification of Biden’s victory, and to put forward illegitimate pro-Trump slates of electors in states that Biden won. On January 6, 2021, several thousand Trump supporters assembled near the White House to hear inflammatory speeches by Trump and others, then forced their way into the US Capitol and violently disrupted the counting of the Electoral College ballots. When Congress reconvened to complete the count, just eight senators lodged objections to state results, but 139 of the 211 Republicans in the House of Representatives at the time supported objections to the results in at least one state. Biden’s inauguration proceeded without incident on January 20.

The events of January 6 prompted several institutional responses, most notably Trump’s impeachment on the charge of incitement of insurrection. The ensuing Senate trial concluded in February with Trump’s acquittal. A House select committee—composed of seven Democrats and two Republicans and tasked with investigating the attack—issued a final report in December 2022. It assigned primary responsibility for the violence to Trump and referred him to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.

In August 2023, a federal grand jury indicted the former president on four charges related to his alleged attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights. Separately that month, a state-level investigation of Trump’s alleged election interference in Georgia yielded felony charges of racketeering, solicitation, and false statements. Trump was expected to face trial in those cases, and in two other criminal cases involving alleged 2016 hush-money payments in New York and mishandling of classified documents in Florida, sometime in 2024.

As of late 2023, Trump was leading several other candidates in the campaign for the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination. However, in November and December, the Colorado Supreme Court and Maine’s secretary of state ruled that Trump was ineligible to appear on those states’ ballots under Section 3 of the federal constitution’s 14th Amendment, which disqualifies former officials who engaged in “insurrection or rebellion” against the United States. An appeal to the US Supreme Court was pending at year’s end.

Elections for the bicameral Congress are generally free and competitive. The House of Representatives consists of 435 members serving two-year terms. The Senate consists of 100 members—two from each of the 50 states—serving six-year terms, with one-third coming up for election every two years. All national legislators are elected directly by voters in the districts or states that they represent.

The capital district, Puerto Rico, and four overseas US territories are each represented by an elected delegate in the House who can perform most legislative functions but cannot participate in floor votes.

Midterm elections were held in November 2022 and resulted in a change of control of the House of Representatives, while the Senate remained under Democratic control. Republicans gained nine House seats, giving them a majority of 222 to the Democrats’ 213. Following a runoff Senate election in Georgia in December of that year, Democrats held 48 Senate seats, and there were two independent senators who generally vote with the Democrats, giving them control of the chamber; one other senator elected as a Democrat, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, shifted to independent status following the election. Turnout was approximately 47 percent of eligible voters, nearly matching the relatively high figure from the 2018 midterms. There were no serious accusations of result-altering fraud in any race in 2022, and most losing candidates quickly conceded.

The electoral framework is generally fair, though it is subject to some partisan manipulation. The borders of House districts, which must remain roughly equal in population, are redrawn following each decennial census. In the practice known as partisan gerrymandering, House districts, and those for state legislatures, are crafted to maximize the advantage of the party in power in a given state. The redistricting system varies by state, but in most cases it is overseen by elected state officials, and observers have expressed alarm at the growing strategic and technical sophistication of partisan efforts to control redistricting processes and redraw electoral maps. Historically, gerrymandering has also been used as a tool of racial disenfranchisement, specifically targeting Black voters, as well as Hispanic and Native American populations. The Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 generally prohibits racially discriminatory voting rules, and racial gerrymandering has been subject to reversal by federal courts, but it remains a problem in practice. In June 2023, the Supreme Court rejected Alabama’s latest district map, finding that it likely violated the VRA by diminishing the power of Black voters.

In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal judiciary has no authority to prevent state officials from drawing districts to preserve or expand their party’s power. However, some state courts have struck down partisan-gerrymandered maps based on their own constitutions, and a handful of states have established independent bodies to manage redistricting in recent years. Following the finalization of the 2020 census results and corresponding reapportionment, state redistricting occurred in 2021 and 2022, leading to multiple legal battles over gerrymandered maps ahead of the 2022 midterms. Both major parties continued to engage in partisan gerrymandering, but Republicans had greater opportunity to redraw state-level maps because they controlled more state legislatures nationwide. Key maps favoring Democrats were successfully challenged in state courts, while several other maps favoring Republicans were upheld by federal courts.

False fraud claims spurred a new wave of state electoral legislation following the 2020 election. Many of the laws adopted in 2021 and 2022 made voting more difficult, with provisions including stricter voter-identification requirements and reduced eligibility for mail-in ballots. Other states and laws, however, moved in the opposite direction. In the first eight months of 2023, 70 rights-expanding laws were passed across 29 states and the District of Columbia, while 29 new restrictive laws were passed in 16 states, according to the nonpartisan Voting Rights Lab. Attempts to overhaul federal voting-rights legislation have stalled in Congress, though a 2021 executive order issued by the Biden administration directed federal agencies to pursue policies that would promote participation in elections.

A concern since the 2020 election has been efforts by election deniers—particularly those who continue to question the legitimacy of Biden’s victory—to take control of election management authority in states that are closely contested in presidential elections; their opponents argue that such actors could facilitate the partisan subversion of presidential election outcomes in the future. In the 2022 midterm elections, a number of election deniers were defeated in races for governor, attorney general, and secretary of state, a key election administration post, in crucial states such as Michigan, Arizona, and Nevada. Others won office at the local level. Separately, a spending bill passed by Congress in December 2022 included reforms designed to minimize the possibility of a constitutional crisis arising from bad-faith interpretations of the ambiguously worded Electoral Count Act, an 1887 law governing congressional validation of the Electoral College votes from the states.

The constitution’s allocation of two Senate seats to each state regardless of its population has meant that senators representing a minority of the population can control a majority in the chamber. Similarly, because Electoral College votes are allocated to the states based on the size of their congressional delegations, and because most states award all of their electors to the state-level winner regardless of the margin, it is possible for a candidate to win the presidency while losing the national popular vote—an outcome that took place in the presidential elections of 2000 and 2016.

The six-member Federal Election Commission, which is legally prohibited from having a Democratic or Republican majority, is tasked with enforcing federal campaign finance laws. Commissioners are appointed to six-year terms by the president and approved by the Senate. Most enforcement actions require four votes, allowing partisan obstruction, and the body has consequently been regarded as ineffective in recent years.

The intensely competitive US political environment is dominated by two major parties: the Republicans on the right and the Democrats on the left. The country’s prevailing “first-past-the-post” (or majoritarian) electoral system, along with single-member districts, discourages the emergence of additional parties. For the many seats at all levels that are regarded as “safely” Democratic or Republican due to a combination of geographical sorting and partisan gerrymandering, the two parties’ primary elections often represent the main battleground for opposing views, and many states exclude unaffiliated voters from participating in this important stage of the electoral process. Nevertheless, primaries and general elections in recent years have featured participation by ideologically diverse candidates across the country.

Independent or third-party candidates have sometimes influenced presidential races or won statewide office, and small parties and ideological factions—such as the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, and the Democratic Socialists of America—have also modestly affected local politics. During 2023, multiple third-party candidates representing independent, libertarian, and progressive views positioned themselves to run in the 2024 general elections. Several jurisdictions, including Maine, Alaska, and New York City, have adopted ranked-choice voting systems for some posts; such systems are typically more hospitable to third parties and centrist candidates than the majoritarian system, though in practice the results in the United States have generally matched those of the traditional plurality system.

Power changes hands regularly at the federal level, and while certain states and localities are seen as strongholds of one party or the other, even they are subject to intraparty competition and interparty power transfers over time. In the 2022 elections, Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives following two terms of Democratic majorities, but their gains were smaller than expected. In 2023, after gubernatorial elections in Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi, Democrats held the governorship in 23 states, compared with Republicans’ 27. By year’s end, there was unified partisan control of the legislature and governorship in 40 states—23 Republican and 17 Democratic.

Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss to Biden put serious pressure on the political and electoral systems, eroding the long-standing tradition of respect for official results and highlighting potential structural weaknesses that could be exploited further. The persistence of unfounded doubts about the fairness of election administration continued to cause concern that future transfers of power could be disrupted.

Various interest groups have come to play a potent role in the nominating process for president and members of Congress, partly because the expense and length of political campaigns place a premium on candidates’ ability to raise large amounts of funds from major donors. Attempts to restrict the role of money in political campaigning have typically been thwarted or watered down as a result of political opposition, lobbying by interest groups, and court decisions that cite the constitutional right to freedom of speech.

The 2020 election campaigns included by far the most expensive presidential race ever, and 2022 marked the most expensive midterms to date. As with other recent campaigns, much of the spending was routed through various types of “super PACs” (political action committees that are not supposed to coordinate with any candidate), nonprofit organizations, and other legal entities that often protect donor anonymity and carry few restrictions on the size and source of donations. Small donations make up an important share of candidates’ fundraising, but extremely wealthy contributors play an outsized role in overall spending.

Concerns about undue influence have also focused on lobbyists and others working for foreign governments who associate themselves with politicians or political campaigns. The Justice Department has increased enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) to ensure transparency, but prosecutions alleging illegal consultant work for foreign powers have often resulted in acquittals.

The January 2021 attack on Congress underscored a broader rise in violence and intimidation as a tool of political influence in the United States. Reports of threats against elected officials and local election administrators have proliferated in recent years, with members of Congress subjected to a dramatic rise in intimidation. Meanwhile, prosecutions stemming from the attack continued in 2023. By year’s end, charges had been brought against more than 1,200 defendants, and more than 700 had received sentences. The most serious charges were filed against members of two far-right groups, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, for their alleged coordination of the January 6 violence. In May 2023, former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was found guilty of seditious conspiracy and obstruction of Congress; his 22-year prison sentence, issued in September, was the longest yet imposed on a January 6 perpetrator.

A number of important laws are designed to ensure the political rights of women and members of racial and ethnic minority groups, and recent elections have featured an increase in successful candidates representing such groups. LGBT+ people have also won greater political representation over the past several years. Nevertheless, White Americans and men have remained highly overrepresented in Congress, in state legislatures, and in senior policymaking positions.

Racial and ethnic minority groups are disproportionately affected by laws and policies that create obstacles to voting. In 2013 the Supreme Court invalidated portions of the VRA of 1965, ending a requirement for certain states to submit changes to their electoral systems for prior review by federal authorities. In the years since, a number of states—including some that were never subject to the preclearance rule—have partially rolled back innovations like early voting that contributed to higher rates of participation among minority groups. Despite developments in recent years that have weakened the VRA as a safeguard against discriminatory state laws, the Supreme Court’s June 2023 ruling against Alabama’s redistricting map rejected arguments that would have further eroded the law’s protections.

Various other state election-management policies have been criticized for having a disparate impact on racial and ethnic minority groups, including voter-roll purges, arbitrary bureaucratic hurdles to registration, and efforts to punish voter fraud—a very rare phenomenon in US elections. State laws that deny voting rights to citizens with felony convictions continue to disproportionately disenfranchise Black Americans, who are incarcerated at significantly higher rates than other populations.

The elected president and Congress are generally empowered to determine government policies and craft legislation. However, partisan polarization and obstruction in Congress has repeatedly delayed appropriations bills across multiple administrations, resulting in a series of partial shutdowns of federal government operations, most recently in 2018–19. A shutdown was narrowly avoided in September and November 2023 through short-term agreements that postponed the funding deadline to early 2024.

Republicans in the House of Representatives were unable to forge a stable working majority in 2023. Unusually protracted disputes over the speakership in January and October 2023, combined with policy disagreements within the Republican caucus, seriously hampered legislative productivity during the year. The Democrats’ tenuous control of the Senate also complicated legislative action. Objections from senators, most often Republicans, have slowed the confirmation of President Biden’s executive branch nominees, resulting in scores of vacant positions in the higher levels of government departments, agencies, and the military.

Reforms that have been proposed in recent years to strengthen Congress’s ability to serve as a check on the executive had yet to win passage in 2023.

The United States benefits from strong structural safeguards against official corruption, including traditionally independent law enforcement and judicial systems, a free and vigorous press, and an active civil society sector. A variety of regulations and oversight institutions within government are designed to curb conflicts of interest and prevent other situations that could lead to malfeasance. However, regulations pertaining to the influence of money in US politics have long been criticized as inadequate.

The Biden administration has strengthened ethics rules within the executive branch via executive order, and watchdog groups described its efforts to limit cabinet members’ conflicts of interest as effective.

Investigative reporting in 2023 revealed that Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito had received, but not previously disclosed, a range of gifts and benefits from wealthy Republican-aligned donors. Ethical questions were also raised by reports that Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s aides had promoted sales of her book in the course of planning speaking engagements. These investigations spurred calls for Congress to enact a binding code of conduct for the Supreme Court, which is exempt from certain existing rules for federal judges. The high court voluntarily adopted its own code of conduct in November, though it had no clear enforcement mechanism.

Among other high-profile developments during the year, Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey who served as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, was charged in September and October with accepting bribes and conspiring to act on behalf of the Egyptian government. He stepped down as committee chairman but rejected calls to resign from the Senate.

In December, the House of Representatives voted along party lines to approve an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, alleging impropriety stemming from his family’s business dealings. House committees had already conducted months of investigations and held public hearings on the matter, yielding no credible evidence of criminal wrongdoing by the president.

The United States was the first country to adopt a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) over 50 years ago, and the law—along with its state-level counterparts—is actively used by journalists, civil society groups, researchers, the private sector, and members of the public. A 2016 reform law was designed to improve government agencies’ responsiveness to FOIA requests, but complaints about rising backlogs and calls for further FOIA reform persisted in 2023.

The executive branch includes a substantial number of auditing and investigative agencies that are designed to be independent of political influence; such bodies are often spurred to action by the investigative work of journalists. In 2020, however, then president Trump arbitrarily fired or replaced a series of agency inspectors general who had documented or investigated malfeasance by administration officials. In December 2022, Congress passed a spending bill that included provisions intended to reinforce the independence of inspectors general and protect them from presidential interference.

The United States has a free and diverse press, operating under some of the strongest constitutional protections in the world. Nonetheless, media freedom and independence are impaired by challenges ranging from market concentration and economic constraints to partisan bias and disinformation.

According to the US Press Freedom Tracker, a joint project of multiple nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the number of press freedom violations has declined sharply since 2020, falling to 13 arrests or criminal charges and 45 assaults on journalists in 2023, from 146 arrests or criminal charges and 633 assaults in 2020. In one high-profile 2023 case, local police raided the office of the Marion County Record, a small weekly newspaper in Kansas, and searched the homes of its publisher and a local politician, ostensibly in response to the paper’s investigation of the police chief. The police chief then resigned after a public outcry.

The national media environment retains a high degree of pluralism, with newspapers, newsmagazines, traditional broadcasters, cable television networks, and news websites competing for readers and audiences. While internet access is widespread and unrestricted, independent local sources of news have struggled to keep up with technology-driven changes in news consumption and advertising, contributing to significant ownership consolidation in some sectors, and a number of communities with just one or no local news outlet.

News coverage has also grown more polarized, with certain outlets providing a consistently right- or left-leaning perspective. The highly influential cable television network Fox News has been unique, however, in its close alignment with the Republican Party; several prominent on-air personalities and executives migrated to government jobs under the Trump administration, and key hosts have openly endorsed Republican candidates or participated in campaign rallies.

A growing number of Americans look to social media and other online sources for political news, increasing their exposure to false or misleading content of both foreign and domestic origin. The larger platforms have struggled to control harmful material without undermining freedom of expression or damaging their own business interests, though they have at times engaged in mass removals of foreign accounts used to spread disinformation.

In 2021, the states of Florida and Texas adopted laws that aimed to restrict social media platforms’ ability to moderate content and suspend certain accounts, but enforcement of both measures was blocked pending judicial review. The Supreme Court was expected to hear appeals in the cases in 2024. Separately, New York and California adopted laws in 2022 requiring platforms to be more transparent about their content-moderation policies.

The constitution protects the free exercise of religion while barring any official endorsement of a religious faith, and there are no direct government subsidies to houses of worship. The Supreme Court regularly adjudicates difficult cases involving the relationship between religion and the state. In 2022, the court issued several rulings that eased restrictions designed to avoid the appearance of an official endorsement of religion, for example by authorizing public funding of religious schools under some circumstances.

Hate crimes based on religion are generally prosecuted vigorously by law enforcement authorities. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) statistics for 2022, released in 2023, showed an increase in such crimes compared with 2021, even as overall violent crime declined. The Hamas terrorist attack on Israel in October 2023 and the ensuing Israeli military campaign in Gaza reportedly precipitated both anti-Muslim and antisemitic incidents in the United States.

The academic sphere has long featured a high level of intellectual freedom. However, this liberty has come under pressure from both ends of the political spectrum.

On many university campuses, such pressure is associated largely with the progressive left. University faculty have reported instances of professional repercussions or harassment—including on social media—related to curriculum content, textbooks, or statements that some students strongly disagreed with. As a consequence, some professors have engaged in self-censorship. Students on a number of campuses have obstructed guest speakers whose views they find objectionable. In the most highly publicized cases, students and nonstudent activists have physically prevented presentations by controversial speakers, especially those known for their views on race, gender, immigration, Middle East politics, and other sensitive issues.

Social and political forces on the right have applied pressure of their own in recent years. State-level officials have advanced policies and legislation that limit classroom discussion of—or access to books and other materials on—certain topics or ideas related to race, sex, and gender. Educators and administrators who were concerned about accreditation, legal liability, and parental anger have reportedly acted preemptively to eliminate or alter courses and remove previously well-regarded texts from school libraries. These developments took place against the backdrop of a sharp rise in threats and intimidation aimed at school officials, and as well-funded and organized conservative or right-wing parents’ groups engaged in extensive efforts to control school curriculums and the materials offered in school and public libraries.

The conflict in Israel and Gaza that began in October 2023 ignited campus protests and other tensions, testing universities’ policies on free speech and academic freedom. While some institutions allowed disruptive protests to proceed, elsewhere students were prevented from occupying university facilities or saw their organizations suspended for breaching university rules. Academic leaders came under intense pressure to respond to Hamas’s terrorist attacks, the Israeli military campaign, and the ways in which the situation affected campus politics and student safety. The presidents of three prominent universities faced calls to resign over their unsatisfactory answers to questions at a December congressional hearing about antisemitism on US campuses; one of them, the head of the University of Pennsylvania, had stepped down by year’s end.

Americans are generally free to engage in private discussion and air their personal views in public settings, including on the internet, though there are a number of threats to this freedom.

Civil libertarians, many lawmakers, and other observers have pointed to the real and potential effects of the government’s collection of communications data and other forms of intelligence-related monitoring on the rights of US residents, despite the adoption of significant reforms over the past decade. Separately, surveillance programs run by federal and local law enforcement agencies have long raised concerns among civil liberties groups, due in part to allegations of a disproportionate focus on religious, racial, and ethnic minority communities. A growing number of law enforcement and other government agencies are monitoring public social media content, with targets including applicants for US visas and participants in protests.

A public debate about law enforcement access to encrypted communication services continues. Some officials warn that their technical inability to break encryption even with a judicial warrant poses a threat to the rule of law, and opponents argue that any weakening of encrypted services’ security would expose all users to criminal hacking and other ill effects.

Aside from concerns about government surveillance, internet users in the United States have faced problems such as aggressive disinformation efforts, intimidation, and frequently sexualized harassment on social media that may deter them from engaging in online discussion and expressing their views freely.

In general, officials respect the constitutional right to public assembly. Demonstrations on political and other topics are common and typically proceed without incident, though local authorities often place restrictions on the location or duration of large protests.

Police officers rarely face punishment for violence against protesters, for example, in cases of apparent abuse caught on camera during a wave of antiracism protests in 2020. Conditions surrounding more recent mass assemblies have generally been more peaceful, however, including those triggered by the fighting in Israel and Gaza in 2023, notwithstanding scattered reports of arrests and clashes with police.

US laws and practices give wide freedom to NGOs and activists to pursue their civic or policy agendas, for example by mounting public campaigns or filing lawsuits to block government actions that they consider harmful. Organizations committed to the protection of civil liberties, immigrants’ rights, equality for women and minority groups, and freedom of speech have been especially active in recent years, as have those seeking to address deficiencies in the electoral and criminal justice systems.

Federal law generally guarantees trade unions the right to organize and engage in collective bargaining. The right to strike is also legally protected for most workers, though many public employees are prohibited from striking. Over the years, the strength of organized labor has declined, and just 6 percent of the private-sector workforce belonged to unions in 2023. While public-sector unions had a higher rate of membership, with 32.5 percent, they have come under pressure as well. The overall unionization rate in 2023 was 10 percent, down slightly from 10.1 percent in 2022. The country’s labor code and decisions by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) during Republican presidencies have been regarded as impediments to organizing efforts, but Democratic administrations, which are generally more supportive of union interests, have failed to reverse the deterioration. Union organizing is also hampered by resistance from private employers. Among other tactics, many employers categorize workers as contractors or use rules pertaining to franchisees to prevent organizing.

A 2018 Supreme Court ruling that government employees cannot be required to contribute to unions representing them in collective bargaining has led to losses in union membership, and 27 states have “right-to-work” legislation in place, allowing private-sector workers who benefit from union bargaining to similarly opt out of paying union dues or fees.

However, a labor shortage that accompanied the economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic starting in 2021 emboldened many workers to make demands in negotiations with employers. The trend accelerated in 2023, with more than 500,000 workers going on strike in various industries over the course of the year. In September 2023, the United Auto Workers (UAW) went on strike after failing to conclude contracts with three major automakers. President Biden made an appearance to show support for striking UAW members in Michigan, marking the first time a US president had joined a picket line. The union reached agreements with the three companies by the end of October, achieving most of their demands.

The American judiciary is largely independent. The courts regularly demonstrate their autonomy by blocking or limiting executive and legislative actions, and this continued during 2023.

However, the pattern of judicial appointments in recent years has added to existing concerns about partisan distortion of the appointment and confirmation process. Norm-breaking procedural maneuvering allowed Senate Republicans to hold open an unusually large number of judicial vacancies under President Barack Obama and then fill them under President Trump, including a Supreme Court vacancy that began during Obama’s final year in office. Trump filled two additional vacancies on the Supreme Court in 2018 and 2020 after deeply contentious Senate hearings and nearly party-line votes. These appointments cemented a conservative Supreme Court majority.

In many states, judges are chosen through either partisan or nonpartisan elections, and a rise in campaign fundraising and party involvement in such elections over the last two decades has increased the threat of bias and favoritism in state courts. In addition, executive and legislative officials in a growing number of states have attempted to exert greater control over state courts. During 2023, high-profile judicial elections in states like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Wisconsin both demonstrated and exacerbated the politicization of supreme courts at the state level.

Also in 2023, the multiple court cases against Trump exposed judges, clerks, prosecutors, witnesses, and others to harassment and intimidation, fueled in part by Trump’s own verbal attacks on the legitimacy of the proceedings and the impartiality of the officials involved. Federal prosecutors reported a pattern of threats against individuals associated with the election-interference case.

The United States has a deeply rooted rule-of-law tradition, and legal and constitutional protections for due process are widely observed. However, the criminal justice system suffers from a number of chronic weaknesses, many of which are tied to racial discrimination and contribute to disparities in outcomes that disadvantage people of color, particularly Black Americans. Media reports and analyses in recent years have drawn new attention to the extensive use of plea bargaining in criminal cases, with prosecutors employing the threat of harsh sentences to avoid trial and effectively reducing the role of the judiciary and juries; deficiencies in the parole system; long-standing funding shortages for public defenders, who represent low-income defendants in criminal cases; racial bias in risk-assessment tools for decisions on pretrial detention; and the practice of imposing court fees or fines for minor offenses as a means of raising local budget revenues, which can lead to jail terms for those who are unable to pay.

These problems and evolving enforcement and sentencing policies have contributed to major increases in incarceration over time. The population of sentenced state and federal prisoners soared from about 200,000 in 1970 to more than 1.6 million in 2009, then gradually decreased to roughly 1.2 million as of the end of 2022, according to the most recent data available. The incarceration rate based on such counts rose from around 100 per 100,000 US residents in 1970 to a peak of more than 500 in the late 2000s, then fell to about 379 as of the end of 2022. There are also hundreds of thousands of pretrial detainees and short-term jail inmates behind bars. Despite gradual declines in the number of Black prisoners, Black and Hispanic inmates continue to account for a majority of the prison population, whereas Black and Hispanic people account for roughly a third of the general US population.

In recent years, Congress and the executive branch have enacted modest reforms to address mass incarceration and racial disparities in sentencing, such as a 2018 law that eased federal mandatory-minimum sentencing rules and a 2022 Justice Department policy designed to reduce sentencing gaps between similar drug offenses. A majority of states have also passed laws in recent years to reduce sentences for certain crimes, decriminalize minor drug offenses, and combat recidivism. Such gradual steps slowed amid fears of rising crime in 2022 and 2023, though these concerns were not always supported by crime statistics.

Both the US homicide rate—at 6.3 per 100,000 inhabitants as of 2022, according to FBI data—and overall crime rates have declined substantially since the 1990s. However, the figures remain high when compared with other wealthy democracies, and the homicide rate rose by a third between 2019 and 2021, with even higher spikes in a number of large cities. After an initial decline in 2022, preliminary data indicated that the number of murders fell more sharply in 2023.

The increased policy focus on reforming the criminal justice system in recent years has coincided with a series of widely publicized incidents in which police actions led to civilian deaths. Most of these prominent cases involved Black civilians, while Native Americans are reportedly killed by police at a higher rate per capita than any other group. Only a small fraction of police killings have led to criminal charges; when officers have been brought to trial, the cases have often ended in acquittals or sentences on reduced charges. In many instances, long-standing and rigid labor protections prevent municipal governments and police departments from imposing significant administrative sanctions on allegedly abusive officers. Nevertheless, some officers have received substantial prison sentences in recent years.

Conditions in prisons, jails, and pretrial detention centers are often poor at the state and local levels. Death rates in jails appear to have risen in recent years, driven not only by the COVID-19 pandemic but also by increased suicides and drug overdoses, with negligence or understaffing among corrections officers a contributing factor in some deaths.

Use of the death penalty has declined over time. There were 24 executions carried out by five states in 2023—up from 18 executions in 2022, but significantly down from a peak of 98 in 1999. The death penalty has been formally abolished by 23 states. In 2020 the federal government resumed executions for the first time since 2003, and 13 federal executions were carried out before the Biden administration imposed a moratorium in 2021. Factors encouraging the decline of the death penalty include clear racial disparities in its application; a pattern of exonerations of death-row inmates; states’ inability to obtain chemicals used in lethal injections due to objections from producers; multiple cases of botched executions; and the high costs to state and federal authorities associated with death penalty cases. The US Supreme Court has effectively ruled out the death penalty for crimes other than murder and in cases where the perpetrator is a juvenile or intellectually disabled, among other restrictions.

An array of policies and programs are designed to protect the rights of individuals against discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, and other categories, including in the workplace. However, women and some minority groups continue to suffer from disparities on various indicators, and a number of recent government policies and practices have infringed on the fundamental rights of asylum seekers and immigrants.

Although women constitute almost half of the US workforce and have increased their representation in many professions, the average compensation for female workers is roughly 84 percent of that for male workers, a gap that has remained relatively constant over the past several decades. Meanwhile, the wage gap between White and Black workers has grown in recent decades, meaning Black women, who are affected by both the gender and racial components of wage inequality, made about 64 cents for every dollar earned by White male workers as of 2022, according to the most recent data available. Women are also most often affected by sexual harassment and assault in the workplace. A popular and ongoing social media campaign that began in late 2017, the #MeToo movement, has encouraged victims to speak out about their experiences, leading to accountability for some perpetrators and underscoring the scale of the problem in American society.

In addition to structural inequalities and discrimination in wages and employment, racial and ethnic minority groups face long-running and interrelated disparities in education and housing. De facto school segregation is a persistent problem, and the housing patterns that contribute to it are influenced by factors such as mortgage discrimination. These factors in turn influence overall gaps in wealth and social mobility. For example, the median wealth of White households in 2022 was approximately six times the median wealth of Black households. In June 2023, the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions systems at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, finding them unconstitutionally discriminatory. The decision cast doubt on the legality of a range of other institutions’ efforts to address long-standing racial disparities through affirmative action.

Violence motivated by racism or other forms of group animosity is a frequent occurrence in the United States. Despite a drop in violent crime rates, hate crimes have risen markedly, increasing by more than 7 percent between 2021 and 2022, according to the latest FBI data. These figures included a 16 percent increase in anti-LGBT+ hate crimes.

In general, LGBT+ people have made strides toward legal equality in recent years. In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that federal civil rights legislation includes LGBT+ people as a class protected from workplace discrimination. The Biden administration lifted a Trump-era ban on transgender people serving in the military in 2021, and it has taken other steps to affirm the rights of transgender people. However, a June 2023 Supreme Court decision limited the reach of public accommodations laws, affirming the right of certain vendors to deny services to LGBT+ customers on free-speech grounds. Over the past two years, lawmakers in several states have adopted laws that ban discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in most primary-school classrooms, and states continued to pass legislation that negatively affected transgender people in 2023.

Immigration and border security remained prominent policy challenges in 2023. In January, the Biden administration announced a new policy offering humanitarian parole to a fixed number of migrants fleeing repressive conditions in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, but only if they adhered to strict eligibility requirements and applied from abroad; those crossing the US–Mexican border without doing so would be expelled. Separately in May, as an emergency authority that had allowed expedited expulsions on public health grounds expired, the administration issued a new regulation presuming that migrants who seek asylum in the United States are ineligible if they passed through third countries without seeking protection there first.

Despite these and other measures, large numbers of people were still able to cross the border, apply for asylum, and secure release pending a hearing on their cases. Many states and municipalities declared states of emergency as they struggled to manage new arrivals. Authorities in the border state of Texas actively transported migrants to northern cities to draw attention to the problem, and sought to enforce their own ban on irregular crossings, prompting a series of legal disputes.

A backlog of cases in immigration courts continued to balloon, denying due process to those affected. As of December 2023, there were more than three million pending cases, including more than a million pertaining to asylum. Average wait times were reportedly more than four years, though the cases of people held in immigration detention tended to move more quickly. Human rights and immigrant advocacy groups criticized the government for taking inadequate measures to address poor conditions in immigration detention facilities. Separately, challenges to the legality of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which prevents the deportation of undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children, continued to make their way through the courts during 2023.

There are no significant undue restrictions on freedom of movement within the United States, and residents are generally free to travel abroad without improper obstacles.

Property rights are widely respected in the United States. The legal and political environments are supportive of entrepreneurial activity and business ownership.

Men and women generally enjoy equal rights in divorce and custody proceedings, and there are no undue restrictions on choice of marriage partner, particularly after a 2015 Supreme Court ruling that all states must allow same-sex marriage. In 2022, Congress passed and the president signed the Respect for Marriage Act, which would require the federal government and all states to recognize same-sex marriages performed legally in other states, even if the Supreme Court were to reverse its 2015 decision. In recent years, a growing number of states have passed laws to eliminate exemptions that allowed marriages of people under age 18 in certain circumstances. Rape and domestic or intimate-partner violence remain serious problems. The applicable laws vary somewhat by state, though spousal rape is a crime nationwide. Numerous government and nongovernmental programs are designed to combat such violence and assist victims.

In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned a 1973 precedent and found that the federal constitution did not guarantee a right to abortion, thereby returning the issue to the states. By late 2023, near-total bans on abortion had taken effect in 14 states, with only narrow exceptions that would make access extremely difficult or dangerous in practice. Increased restrictions that would have been blocked before 2022 were in effect in seven other states, and litigation stemming from restrictive legislation continued elsewhere. Critics of the new or revived state restrictions noted that their vague language introduced considerable uncertainty about whether doctors would face prosecution even for providing potentially life-saving care. Scores of clinics were forced to stop offering abortion services or close entirely, compelling women in the affected states to travel to jurisdictions with more liberal laws in order to seek treatment, a constraint that disproportionately burdened women with lower incomes. Some states have responded to the Supreme Court ruling by strengthening existing protections for abortion access. In 2022, referendum voters in six states supported preserving wider access to abortion, and voters in Ohio chose to enshrine abortion rights in that state’s constitution in 2023.

The recent pattern of state laws restricting the rights of transgender people has notably included a number of limitations on access to medical treatments related to bodily autonomy and appearance.

The “American dream”—the notion of a fair society in which hard work will bring economic and social advancement, regardless of the circumstances of one’s birth—is a core part of the country’s identity. In recent decades, however, studies have shown a widening inequality in wealth and a narrowing of access to upward mobility.

One key aspect of inequality in the United States is the growing income and wealth gap between Americans with university degrees and those with a high school degree or less; the number of well-compensated jobs for the less-educated has fallen over time as manufacturing and other positions were lost to automation and lower-cost foreign production. These jobs have generally been replaced by less remunerative or less stable employment in the service and retail sectors, where there is a weaker tradition of unionization.

The inflation-adjusted national minimum wage has fallen substantially since the 1960s, with the last nominal increase in 2009, though many states and localities have enacted increases since then. Other obstacles to gainful employment include inadequate public transportation and the high cost of living in economically dynamic cities and regions. The latter problem, which is exacerbated by exclusionary housing policies in many jurisdictions, has also contributed to an overall rise in homelessness in recent years.