How Democracies Die Study Guide

Steven Levitsky earned his PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1999. Since 2000, he has been a Professor of Government at Harvard University, where his research focuses on democracy, revolution, and political institutions in Latin America (particularly in Peru, Nicaragua, and Argentina). He is especially recognized for his theory of competitive authoritarianism—or countries in which leaders are selected through free elections, but incumbent authoritarian leaders abuse their power to ensure that they always win. He also directs several student groups at Harvard and the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. He has also taught in Peru and frequently offers political commentary in the Peruvian media. Daniel Ziblatt also completed his PhD in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and now teaches in the Department of Government at Harvard University. His research focuses on the history of democracy in Europe, especially in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Besides How Democracies Die, he is also widely known for his award-winning 2017 book Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy. He has taught in several European universities, primarily in Germany. Levitsky and Ziblatt have also written for news outlets including the New York Times, and they co-chair Harvard’s Challenges to Democracy Research Cluster.

In How Democracies Die, Levitsky and Ziblatt use numerous international examples of democratic breakdown in the 20th century to illustrate the dangers American democracy faces in the 21st. They tell the story of Chile’s democratic collapse in the 1970s, the Fujimori dictatorship in Peru in the 1990s, and democratic backsliding in Hungary and Turkey in the 2010s. The authors also explain Benito Mussolini’s rise to power in Italy in the 1920s, Hitler’s in Germany in the 1930s, and Hugo Chávez’s in Venezuela and Vladimir Putin’s in Russia in the 1990s. And they make a point of highlighting lesser-known examples of countries that saved their democracies from authoritarian forces, like Belgium and Finland in the 1930s. However, Levitsky and Ziblatt’s primary focus is the history of the United States since the civil rights movement of the 1960s, when a process of partisan realignment began exacerbating political polarization between the North and South, liberals and conservatives, and different racial, ethnic, and religious groups. In particular, as white segregationist Democrats and Protestants switched to the Republican Party and Black and immigrant voters flocked to the Democrats, each side gradually became more ideologically homogeneous and extreme. Political norms of compromise and restraint started to break down in the 1990s and 2000s, and by the time of Barack Obama’s presidency, many Republicans viewed Democratic politicians as illegitimate and existentially threatening. By explaining this historical context, Levitsky and Ziblatt hope to show that Donald Trump’s election wasn’t a random or unpredictable event—rather, it was the product of historical conditions as much as of Trump’s authoritarian, populist political style. In fact, there have been right-wing demagogues throughout U.S. history, but none of them has gotten the same mainstream political support as Trump because the major parties were never as willing to embrace anti-democratic tactics or as unable to overturn the voters’ will during the primary process as the Republicans were in 2016.

Steven Levitsky’s other most significant work is Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (2010, with Lucan A. Way), which develops a theory of competitive authoritarian regimes, which combine nominally democratic institutions with authoritarian rule. Ziblatt’s other major book is Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (2017), which cites German and British history to argue that establishment conservative parties determine whether new democracies prove successful. Levitsky and Ziblatt cite numerous classic works of political science in How Democracies Die, but some of the most important include Juan Linz’s The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes (1978), Arthur T. Hadley’s The Invisible Primary (1976), and Donald R. Matthews’s U.S. Senators and Their World (1960). Other popular political science books about democracy in the Trump era include Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017) and The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018), Yascha Mounk’s The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It (2018), and Anne Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (2020). During the same period, many journalists have also refocused their work on democracy and autocracy both in the United States and around the globe. They include Masha Gessen (Surviving Autocracy, 2020), Ezra Klein (Why We’re Polarized, 2020), and Michael Lewis, (The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy, 2019).