Steven Levitsky

Steven Levitsky is the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he also directs the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. Trained at Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley, he studies democratization, authoritarian rule, political parties and informal institutions, with particular expertise in Latin America.

His books combine comparative political science with historical case studies. Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America examines the evolution of Argentine Peronism. In Competitive Authoritarianism, written with Lucan Way, he studies regimes that retain meaningful electoral competition while giving incumbents a heavily uneven advantage. Across this work, Levitsky asks how institutions weaken, how parties adapt and why some authoritarian systems endure.

Written with Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die brought those questions to a broad readership. The book argues that elected leaders can dismantle democratic safeguards gradually, aided by weakened political norms and parties that fail to reject authoritarian figures. It became a New York Times bestseller and won the 2019 Goldsmith Book Prize. Levitsky and Ziblatt later published Tyranny of the Minority, an examination of minority rule and structural vulnerabilities in the American political system.

New readers should begin with How Democracies Die. Its comparisons among Europe, Latin America and the United States make Levitsky’s central concern immediately clear: democratic collapse often arrives through institutions that still appear to be functioning.