How Democracies Die

Citation

Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2019). How Democracies Die. Crown.

Chapter Summary

A book of about 320 pages in nine chapters, published as a trade title rather than a textbook. The publisher presents it as the work of two Harvard professors who have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America. Their central claim, as the publisher puts it, is that democracy no longer tends to end with a bang, through 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 publisher also stresses that there are several "exit ramps" on the road to authoritarianism, and that the book draws on historical and global examples ranging from 1930s Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey and Venezuela, and to the American South during Jim Crow. The catalogue record lists nine chapters; the summaries below stay with what the titles and the publisher's description make clear.

Chapter 1: Fateful Alliances

The opening chapter's title suggests a concern with the alliances through which dangerous figures gain access to power. The publisher says the book shows how the actions of elected leaders around the world have paved the road to democratic failure.

Chapters 2–3: Gatekeeping in America; The Great Republican Abdication

Two chapters turn to the United States. The titles suggest a question about who acts as gatekeeper against dangerous figures, and about a Republican abdication of that role. The publisher links the book to the 2016 election and the presidency of Donald Trump.

Chapter 4: Subverting Democracy

The title addresses the methods by which an elected leader can hollow out democratic competition from the inside. The publisher's description names courts and the press among the institutions that are weakened.

Chapters 5–6: The Guardrails of Democracy; The Unwritten Rules of American Politics

These chapters take up the "guardrails" of democracy: the shared beliefs and practices, beyond the formal constitution, that preserve democratic competition. One reviewer quoted by the publisher, Larry Diamond, describes the book as a call to restore exactly those shared beliefs and practices. The second chapter's title points to the unwritten rules of American politics.

Chapters 7–8: The Unraveling; Trump Against the Guardrails

The titles indicate that these two chapters trace the weakening of the guardrails in recent American politics and the way the Trump presidency tested them, carrying the book's argument into the present of its publication.

Chapter 9: Saving Democracy

The closing chapter turns from diagnosis to remedy. The publisher's closing question, whether American democracy can be saved, indicates its direction.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–4: How breakdown happens

• Slow erosion: the book's central picture of democratic failure, in which institutions are weakened step by step rather than overthrown.
• Gatekeeping: the filtering role that keeps dangerous figures out of power, named in the title of Chapter 2.
• Exit ramps: the publisher's phrase for the points at which a country can still turn away from authoritarian rule.

Chapters 5–9: Norms and remedies

• Guardrails of democracy: the shared beliefs and practices, beyond the formal constitution, that keep political competition within bounds.
• Unwritten rules: the informal norms of the American political system, given their own chapter.
• Defending democracy: the question of what citizens and politicians can do, addressed in the final chapter.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A comparative lens. The Financial Times review quoted by the publisher praises the book for rejecting the exceptionalist account of American democracy: the authors place the United States beside cases such as Hungary, Turkey and Venezuela.
• A memorable framework in plain prose. The ideas of guardrails, gatekeepers and unwritten rules give readers concepts that travel to other cases. Reviews quoted by the publisher call it a lucid guide (The New York Times) and fact based (Michael Morell), and a reviewer in California magazine describes it as more erudite than alarmist.
• Recognition. The book won the 2019 Goldsmiths Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize.
• Compact and accessible. At about 320 pages in nine chapters it is easy to read in a short span, and the publisher offers a teacher's guide for classroom use.

Limitations

• A trade book, not a textbook. The publisher presents it as an urgent guide to a single argument; its chapter sequence is that argument, not a systematic survey of theories of democratization.
• Tied to a moment. The description and the chapter titles place the American case, and the Trump presidency in particular, at the centre. Readers coming to it later should expect that its closing chapters speak to the politics of the late 2010s.
• Uneven balance. At least four of the nine chapter titles refer explicitly to America, to Republicans or to Trump, so the European and Latin American cases that the publisher mentions serve mainly as comparison. The argument also bears on live American politics, so students should read it alongside more systematic comparative work.

Where It Fits in the Course

Within the democracy and authoritarianism list this is an accessible entry point to the question of how democracies fail. It sits comfortably beside Erica Frantz's Authoritarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know, a compact primer on what happens once authoritarian rule is established: Levitsky and Ziblatt describe the road to it, Frantz explains how such regimes gain power, survive and fall.

For more academic work, Christian Haerpfer and colleagues' edited textbook Democratization gives a systematic survey of how scholars define and measure democracy and of the waves of democratization and decline. Robert Dahl's Polyarchy sets out the institutional guarantees that define a democratic regime, a standard against which erosion can be judged, and Juan Linz's Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes offers the classic typology of the regimes into which democracies may slide. Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism is a very different, historical and philosophical, analysis of an extreme case.

How to Use This Book

The book needs no background in political science and suits first-year students, general readers and anyone preparing for a course on democratization or comparative politics. It can be read in a week.

• Core: read all nine chapters in order. By the titles, the argument builds from alliances, gatekeeping and subversion (Chapters 1–4) to the guardrails and unwritten rules (Chapters 5–6), then to the recent past (Chapters 7–8), and ends with remedies (Chapter 9).
• Alongside the text: pick one non-American case the publisher names (Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela or 1930s Europe) and look for the same pattern in a country study; then ask whether the idea of guardrails explains it.
• Critical reading: ask which of the authors' claims could be tested with comparative data, and look in library catalogues for the scholarship behind a claim.
• After the book: move to Haerpfer's Democratization for the academic framework and to Dahl or Linz for the classic definitions.