Book Review:” How Democracies Die” by Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt

“Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders — presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power.”

Most people still imagine democracy’s death as something dramatic — tanks in the streets, generals on state television, a constitution torn to pieces overnight. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die argues that this image is dangerously outdated. Democracies today rarely collapse through sudden coups. They decay slowly, from within, often at the hands of leaders who were elected by popular vote and who chip away at institutions until little is left. “Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders — presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power” (p. 5). The process is quieter, more legalistic, and far harder to stop.

Levitsky and Ziblatt, both professors of government at Harvard, build their case through decades of comparative research. They have studied how democracies in Latin America and Europe weakened long before the United States showed similar symptoms. From the rise of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela to Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Alberto Fujimori in Peru, the pattern, they say, is almost always the same: a leader wins elections but then sets about dismantling the checks that keep power limited. Instead of abolishing constitutions, such leaders rewrite them. Instead of banning opponents, they harass them. In the early stages, the legal system is still formally intact. The slow violence happens in the space between the written law and the unwritten norms that make democracy function.

At the heart of their argument are two simple but powerful norms — mutual toleration and institutional forbearance. Mutual toleration means accepting one’s opponents as legitimate, even when they seem misguided or dangerous. Forbearance means refraining from using every legal weapon to destroy one’s rivals. Democracies survive, they write, when politicians “accept their opponents as legitimate and resist the temptation to use the letter of the law to undermine its spirit” (p. 106). The book insists that these habits of restraint are not natural; they must be learned, practiced, and defended by political elites.

This emphasis on informal rules is what makes How Democracies Die both insightful and unsettling. We often assume that constitutions alone can protect a democracy. Levitsky and Ziblatt remind us that the American system endured for over two centuries not only because of its design but because political leaders generally chose to respect its limits. The checks and balances worked because those in power allowed them to. The authors trace how those norms have eroded in the United States — from the partisan trench wars of the 1990s to the rise of Donald Trump, whom they portray not as an isolated figure but as the product of a longer breakdown in gatekeeping.

Parties, they argue, are the first line of defense against authoritarianism. Historically, American parties filtered out demagogues through elite selection and coalition-building. “Democracy’s gatekeepers,” the authors call them (p. 43). But as party control weakened and primary elections empowered outsider candidates, the gate swung open. Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party was only possible because party elites surrendered their traditional screening role. Once inside, he began using the familiar authoritarian toolkit — attacking the press, delegitimizing elections, demanding loyalty from judges and law enforcement, and blurring the line between the state and the ruling party.

Levitsky and Ziblatt do not claim that the United States has already ceased to be a democracy. Their argument is subtler: that its foundations are weaker than we think. The United States, they remind readers, has faced democratic near-death experiences before — during the 1850s when sectional hatred paralysed Congress, and again during the 1960s when white resistance to civil rights threatened democratic legitimacy. What saved it in those moments were political norms, not institutional design.

Their notion of “constitutional hardball” captures this perfectly. Hardball refers to the use of technically legal but norm-breaking moves that erode trust and cooperation — court-packing, blocking judicial appointments, endless investigations, and government shutdowns. Every instance can be justified by procedure, yet the cumulative effect is to transform politics into a zero-sum contest where victory matters more than the system itself. “Constitutional hardball — deploying legal but norm-breaking tactics — gradually erodes the foundations of democracy” (p. 212).

What makes the book persuasive is how it connects the slow unravelling of American norms to global patterns of democratic backsliding. Levitsky and Ziblatt show that democracy rarely collapses by surprise. There are always warning signs. They distill these into a simple four-part test: does a politician reject the democratic rules of the game, deny the legitimacy of opponents, tolerate or encourage violence, or express willingness to curtail civil liberties? (pp. 21–23). Leaders who meet even one of these criteria are red flags; those who meet all four are dangerous. The test is both diagnostic and uncomfortably familiar.

While the book’s urgency and clarity are strengths, it has its blind spots. Levitsky and Ziblatt are primarily concerned with elite behavior — the choices of politicians, judges, and party leaders. This gives their story a sharp focus but leaves less room for deeper structural forces: economic inequality, social polarization, and the dislocations of globalization. These conditions, many argue, are what make populist resentment so potent. The Guardian reviewer called the book “a crucial alarm bell that sounds just before the earthquake,” but one that doesn’t explain the tectonic shifts underneath. That seems fair. The authors show how democratic norms collapse, but not fully why so many citizens turn against them in the first place.

To understand those deeper shifts, it helps to read Levitsky and Ziblatt alongside others who have written about democracy’s unravelling. Fareed Zakaria’s The Rise of Illiberal Democracy (1997) foresaw a world where elected governments might reject liberal values while keeping the ritual of elections. Zakaria’s warning applied mainly to young democracies in Eastern Europe and Asia. Levitsky and Ziblatt extend it to established systems, arguing that even the oldest democracies can decay from within. Where Zakaria focuses on societies gaining elections without liberty, Levitsky and Ziblatt worry about countries losing liberty through elections.

Nancy Bermeo’s essay “On Democratic Backsliding” (2016) also echoes through their work. Bermeo identified how democratic erosion now happens through “promissory coups” and “executive aggrandizement” — leaders claiming to strengthen democracy while quietly undermining it. Levitsky and Ziblatt adopt her empirical framework but add a moral dimension: they call on political actors to restore restraint and mutual respect. For them, democracy is as much an ethical commitment as an institutional arrangement.

The intellectual ancestor of all these debates is Juan Linz, whose studies of interwar Europe and Latin America described how democracies fall when elites refuse to cooperate across ideological divides. Linz’s famous essay “The Perils of Presidentialism” argued that rigid political systems are especially vulnerable to crisis. Levitsky and Ziblatt’s book feels like a contemporary rewriting of Linz’s warning for the age of polarization: the crisis today is not in presidentialism itself but in the disappearance of shared democratic norms that make any constitutional system workable.

Larry Diamond and other recent scholars go further still, suggesting that the global wave of democratic regression since the early 2000s stems from deeper global trends — inequality, digital manipulation, and foreign disinformation. Compared with them, Levitsky and Ziblatt keep their focus tightly on domestic politics and elite choices. That focus makes their message sharper but also narrower. They tell us what elites must do to save democracy but less about what citizens can do beyond voting and protest.

Still, the book’s greatest strength lies in its simplicity. It makes you see democracy not as a structure but as a fragile habit of mind. A habit that can disappear quietly. Reading it, one realizes that institutions cannot rescue a political culture that has lost the will to restrain itself. The risk is not that democracy will end overnight but that, one legal step at a time, it will forget how to behave like one.

Levitsky and Ziblatt end on a note that is both warning and hope: “The fate of our democracy is not sealed. It depends, to a striking degree, on the willingness of politicians to place democratic principles above short-term partisan gain” (p. 9). That choice, they insist, lies not only with political leaders but with citizens who must demand better of them. “We must learn again to see our opponents as fellow citizens, not as enemies to be vanquished” (p. 230).

It’s a modest prescription, yet in an age of rage and distrust, it might be the hardest one to follow.