What is How Democracies Die about?

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.

The structural diagnosis centers on two unwritten rules they call mutual toleration — accepting the legitimacy of political opponents — and institutional forbearance — restraint in using legal powers to their maximum extent. These norms have enforced a kind of self-limitation that prevented American politics from becoming zero-sum. When those norms erode, the institutions that seemed robust reveal themselves as dependent on the goodwill of the people operating them. Courts can be packed, oversight bodies can be ignored, emergency powers can be stretched — all legally, within the rules.

Published before the end of Trump's first term, the book has been credited with providing a framework that proved prescient. Its limitation, acknowledged by the authors in later work, is that it focuses more on diagnosis than remedy. The mechanisms of democratic erosion are described clearly; the mechanisms of democratic recovery are less developed. The comparison with other countries where democratic erosion has been reversed — South Korea, Brazil — suggests recovery is possible but requires exactly the kinds of coalition-building and norm enforcement that are hardest when norms are already under stress.