How do you know when your country has become an autocracy?

Schemes of national governance are complicated and subject to generalization, but for the sake of argument, let’s put “democracy” at one end of a spectrum and “autocracy” at the other and consider the bright line that separates them?

There isn’t one. In fact, since 1997, the Center for Systemic Peace has maintained a 21-point scale that takes into account various political variables — elections, the role of the military, economic inequality, political violence and so on — in order to describe where countries stand on the scale between democracy and autocracy.

On the autocracy end, at -10, are the countries that you would expect: North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, obvious autocracies all. At +10 are the apparent democracies: Switzerland, New Zealand, Canada and, until recently, the Unite