NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The urgent and influential guide to the forces that have undermined democracies across the globe — hailed as “a touchstone” (The New Yorker) that “comes at exactly the right moment” (The Washington Post)WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITH BOOK PRIZE • SHORTLISTED FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Time, Foreign Affairs, WBUR, Paste
“Comprehensive, enlightening, and terrifyingly timely.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
“[Levitsky and Ziblatt] expand the conversation…to other countries and to the deep structure of American democracy and politics.”—Ezra Klein
The current era has raised a question that many of us never thought we’d be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang—in a revolution or military coup—but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that, by electing Trump, we have already passed the first one.
Drawing on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples, from 1930s Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, to the American South during Jim Crow, Levitsky and Ziblatt show how democracies die. Now the question is, can our democracy be saved?
REVIEWS
“The most important book of the Trump era was not Bob Woodward’s Fear or Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury or any of the other bestselling exposes of the White House circus. Arguably it was a wonkish tome by two Harvard political scientists, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, published a year into Donald Trump’s presidency and entitled How Democracies Die.”—The Economist
“If you want to understand what’s happening to our country, the book you really need to read is How Democracies Die.”—Paul Krugman
“Scholarly and readable, alarming and level-headed . . . the greatest of the many merits of Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s contribution to what will doubtless be the ballooning discipline of democracy death studies is their rejection of western exceptionalism.”—The Guardian
“[An] important new book.”—Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times
“The political-science text in vogue this winter is How Democracies Die.”—The New Yorker
“The great strength of Levitsky and Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die is that it rejects the exceptionalist account of US democracy. Their lens is comparative. The authors say America is not immune to the trends that have led to democracy’s collapse in other parts of the world.”—Financial Times
“A powerful wake-up call.”—Foreign Affairs
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Steven Levitsky
David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies
Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He is Senior Fellow at the Kettering Foundation and a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions, with a focus on Latin America. He is co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times Best-Seller and was published in 30 languages, and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. He has written or edited 11 other books, including Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2003), Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (with Lucan Way) (Princeton University Press, 2022). He and Lucan Way are currently working on a book on democratic resilience across the world.
Professor Levitsky has written for New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and The New Republic, and he has been a columnist for La Republica (Peru) and Folha de São Paulo (Brazil).
Daniel Ziblatt
Eaton Professor of the Science of Government
Daniel Ziblatt is the Eaton Professor of Government at Harvard University and Director of Harvard University’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. He also leads a research group on democracy and democratic erosion at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center in Germany.
He is the author of four books, including How Democracies Die (Crown, 2018), co-authored with Steve Levitsky, a New York Times best-seller and described by The Economist magazine as “the most important book of the Trump era.” The book has been translated into thirty languages. In 2017, he authored Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2017), an account of the history of democracy in Europe, which won the American Political Science Association’s 2018 Woodrow Wilson Prize for the best book in government and international relations and American Sociological Association’s 2018 Barrington Moore Prize. His first book was an analysis of 19th century state building, Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy and Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism (Princeton, 2006). In Fall 2023, his newest book entitled Tyranny of the Minority (co-authored with Steve Levitsky) puts America’s contemporary transition into a multiracial democracy in comparative and historical perspective, and shows the distinctive vulnerabilities of the U.S. constitutional order.
Ziblatt maintains an active research program that is published in journals such as the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and World Politics. In 2023, he was elected member of the American Academy for Arts and Sciences.
