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What it argues
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt are Harvard comparative politics scholars who have spent their careers studying how democracies break down in Latin America and Europe. How Democracies Die, published in January 2018, applies that scholarship directly to the United States. Its central argument is that democracies today rarely end in coups — they die gradually, through the incremental erosion of the norms and institutions that make them function, usually carried out by elected leaders who retain democratic legitimacy while dismantling democratic constraints.
The book introduces two behavioral tests for identifying authoritarian leaders: rejection of democratic rules of the game, denial of the legitimacy of political opponents, toleration or encouragement of violence, and willingness to curtail civil liberties. These indicators, drawn from twentieth-century failures in Europe and Latin America, allow comparison across cases that might seem geographically and culturally remote from the United States. The authors argue that Latin American experience is particularly instructive because it shows what democratic erosion looks like when the gatekeeping institutions that historically protected American democracy — particularly the Republican and Democratic parties — fail to do their job.
What it gets right
- 1.
Modern democracies typically die not through military coups but through the incremental undermining of institutions by elected leaders who retain democratic legitimacy.
- 2.
Four behavioral warning signs identify authoritarian leaders: rejection of democratic rules, denial of opponent legitimacy, toleration of political violence, and willingness to restrict civil liberties.
- 3.
Mutual toleration — accepting rivals as legitimate — and institutional forbearance — restraining use of legal powers — are the unwritten norms that hold competitive democracy together.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt are professors of government at Harvard University. Levitsky is a specialist in Latin American politics and comparative authoritarianism; Ziblatt specializes in European political development and the history of democracy in Germany and Britain. Both have published extensively in academic journals and with university presses before How Democracies Die brought their comparative work to a general audience. They followed up with Tyranny of the Minority in 2023, which shifts focus from behavioral norms to constitutional structures. Together they represent the leading academic voices on democratic backsliding in the American context.
