How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702019853231 |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| Author | Jennifer M. Welsh |
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
How Democracies Die
Crown Publishing: New York, 2018; 312 pp. $35.00 (hbk)
ISBN 978-I-5247-6293-3
Reviewed by: Jennifer M. Welsh (jennifer.welsh@mcgill.ca), McGill University, Montreal,
Canada
When a book by two political scientists features prominently on airport shelves
across Europe and North America, in a conveniently sized paperback format, we
know that it has captured the zeitgeist of our time. Democracy, we are told from all
corners, is on the ropes. Whether we consider the disturbing data from the NGO
Freedom House, which tracks the decline in the quantity and quality of democra-
cies, or the chorus of political commentators decrying the rise of populism, there is
growing unease about the nature and potential consequences of democratic decli-
ne—not just ‘‘out there,’’ but right at home.
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt tap into this malaise, but also seek to snap us
out of it. The overarching goal of their comparative and historical analysis is to
explain not just why and how democracies experience crisis, but also how they can
disappear altogether, and often with a whimper rather than a bang. Indeed, the first
key argument of the book is that democratic death, and the turn to authoritarian-
ism, is most often a gradual slide rather than the product of a dramatic event
featuring ‘‘men with guns’’ (3).
Drawing upon Levitsky’s expertise as a Latin Americanist, and Ziblatt’s schol-
arship on European state-building, How Democracies Die analyzes historical
instances of democratic political elites inviting fringe anti-democrats into their
governing arrangements, and inadvertently buttressing the fortunes of these auto-
crats-in-waiting by overestimating their own power to rein them in. But the authors
also serve up ‘‘positive’’ cases of mainstream parties from left and right consciously
allying against authoritarianism—as in the case of Belgium’s right-wing Catholics
and liberals in a coalition to defeat fascism in the 1930s. The message is clear: the
true democrats need to watch for the warning signs (more on these below) and act
wisely and pre-emptively to deny opportunity and power to the anti-democrats.
The second central argument is that democratic norms—unwritten rules and
practices—are more important than formal institutions in understanding how
democracies survive and thrive. In fact, without robust norms, institutions can
all too easily become just another political weapon, ‘‘wielded forcefully by those
who control them against those who do not’’ (7). The implication is that we should
International Journal
2019, Vol. 74(2) 324–339
!The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0020702019853231
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