How Democracies Die

“On the electoral road, none of these things happen. There are no tanks in the streets. Constitutions and other nominally democratic institutions remain in place. People still vote. Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance.” 

Levitsky and Ziblatt introduce a central theme of the book: that democratic breakdown occurs both through violent coups and the steady and almost imperceptible erosion of the infrastructure of democracy. In this way democracies can become autocracies in all but name, without citizens realizing. In introducing this idea, they’re also justifying the existence of the book, which aims to identify the process by which democracies fall apart, in hope of averting such a scenario in the United States.

“A comparative approach also reveals how elected autocrats in different parts of the world employ remarkably similar strategies to subvert democratic institutions. As these patterns become visible, the steps toward breakdown grow less ambiguous—and easier to combat. Knowing how citizens in other democracies have successfully resisted elected autocrats, or why they tragically failed to do so, is essential to those seeking to defend American democracy today.” 

The authors draw on examples of authoritarian turns throughout the 20th and 21st centuries to illustrate how democracies fall apart and to present a cautionary tale for vulnerable systems, such as that of the United States. This provides the background for the diagnostic tool the authors propose, a litmus test for identifying autocrats. Since these kinds of leaders adopt similar strategies, their behavior can usefully be analyzed to identify patterns. As this quote shows, positive examples are also useful. By highlighting instances such as the bipartisan cooperation in the 2016 Austrian presidential election that kept an extremist candidate from winning the presidency, the authors offer a sense of hope that the slide to authoritarianism can be resisted and reversed.