How Democracies Die

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, political scientists at Harvard, examine how elected leaders can wear down a democracy from within, rather than through coups or foreign invasions. Comparing cases such as Hungary, Venezuela, Poland, Russia, Thailand and Turkey, and looking back to 1930s Europe and the Jim Crow South, they stress two unwritten norms that act as soft guardrails: mutual toleration, accepting rivals as legitimate, and institutional forbearance, declining to use legal powers to the hilt. They warn against constitutional hardball such as court-packing and blocked nominations. Later chapters turn to the United States, Donald Trump and the 2016 election, and the book closes with three possible scenarios for a post-Trump America. It won the 2019 Goldsmith Book Prize.

Barack Obama listed it among his best books of 2018 in a Facebook post.