How Democracies Die

by Steven Levitsky

During the Cold War, coups d’état accounted for nearly three out of every four democratic breakdowns. Democracies in Argentina, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Thailand, Turkey, and Uruguay all died this way. More recently, military coups toppled Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi in 2013 and Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra in 2014.

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. Some of these leaders dismantle democracy quickly, as Hitler did in the wake of the 1933 Reichstag fire in Germany. More often, though, democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps.

As a woman in Chávez’s home state of Barinas put it on election night, “Democracy is infected. And Chávez is the only antibiotic we have.”

Blatant dictatorship—in the form of fascism, communism, or military rule—has disappeared across much of the world. Military coups and other violent seizures of power are rare. Most countries hold regular elections. Democracies still die, but by different means. Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected governments themselves. Like Chávez in Venezuela, elected leaders have subverted democratic institutions in Georgia, Hungary, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Ukraine. Democratic backsliding today begins at the ballot box.

Citizens continue to criticize the government but often find themselves facing tax or other legal troubles.

For the sake of clarity, we are defining a democracy as a system of government with regular, free and fair elections, in which all adult citizens have the right to vote and possess basic civil liberties such as freedom of speech and association.

We know that extremist demagogues emerge from time to time in all societies, even in healthy democracies. The United States has had its share of them, including Henry Ford, Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace. An essential test for democracies is not whether such figures emerge but whether political leaders, and especially political parties, work to prevent them from gaining power in the first place—by keeping them off mainstream party tickets, refusing to endorse or align with them, and when necessary, making common cause with rivals in support of democratic candidates. Isolating popular extremists requires political courage. But when fear, opportunism, or miscalculation leads established parties to bring extremists into the mainstream, democracy is imperiled.

Without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not serve as the bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be. Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not. This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents.

Two basic norms have preserved America’s checks and balances in ways we have come to take for granted: mutual toleration, or the understanding that competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals, and forbearance, or the idea that politicians should exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives.

Norms of toleration and restraint served as the soft guardrails of American democracy, helping it avoid the kind of partisan fight to the death that has destroyed democracies elsewhere in the world, including Europe in the 1930s and South America in the 1960s and 1970s.

A quarrel had arisen between the Horse and the Stag, so the Horse came to a Hunter to ask his help to take revenge on the Stag. The Hunter agreed but said: “If you desire to conquer the Stag, you must permit me to place this piece of iron between your jaws, so that I may guide you with these reins, and allow this saddle to be placed upon your back so that I may keep steady upon you as we follow the enemy.” The Horse agreed to the conditions, and the Hunter soon saddled and bridled him. Then, with the aid of the Hunter, the Horse soon overcame the Stag and said to the Hunter: “Now get off, and remove those things from my mouth and back.” “Not so fast, friend,” said the Hunter. “I have now got you under bit and spur and prefer to keep you as you are at present.” —“The Horse, the Stag, and the Hunter,” Aesop’s Fables

On October 30, 1922, Benito Mussolini arrived in Rome at 10:55 A.M. in an overnight sleeping car from Milan. He had been invited to the capital city by the king to accept Italy’s premiership and form a new cabinet.

He used his party’s 35 parliamentary votes (out of 535), divisions among establishment politicians, fear of socialism, and the threat of violence by 30,000 Blackshirts to capture the attention of the timid King Victor Emmanuel III, who saw in Mussolini a rising political star and a means of neutralizing unrest. With political order restored by Mussolini’s appointment and socialism in retreat, the Italian stock market soared. Elder statesmen of the Liberal establishment, such as Giovanni Giolitti and Antonio Salandra, found themselves applauding the turn of events.

A cast of political outsiders, including Adolf Hitler, Getúlio Vargas in Brazil, Alberto Fujimori in Peru, and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, came to power on the same path: from the inside, via elections or alliances with powerful political figures. In each instance, elites believed the invitation to power would contain the outsider, leading to a restoration of control by mainstream politicians.

The Weimar political system had been founded in 1919 by a prodemocratic coalition of Catholics, Liberals, and Social Democrats.

This sort of devil’s bargain often mutates to the benefit of the insurgent, as alliances provide outsiders with enough respectability to become legitimate contenders for power.

But in dropping all charges, rather than allowing Chávez to stand trial and then pardoning him, Caldera elevated him, transforming the former coup leader overnight into a viable presidential candidate.

Not only were they all outsiders with a flair for capturing public attention, but each of them rose to power because establishment politicians overlooked the warning signs and either handed over power to them (Hitler and Mussolini) or opened the door for them (Chávez).

Not all democracies have fallen into this trap. Some—including Belgium, Britain, Costa Rica, and Finland—have faced challenges from demagogues but also have managed to keep them out of power.

Before the Nazis and Fascists seized power, less than 2 percent of the population were party members, and neither party achieved anything close to a majority of the vote in free and fair elections.

Although mass responses to extremist appeals matter, what matters more is whether political elites, and especially parties, serve as filters.

Hitler led a failed putsch; Chávez led a failed military uprising; Mussolini’s Blackshirts engaged in paramilitary violence; and in Argentina in the mid–twentieth century, Juan Perón helped lead a successful coup two and a half years before running for president.

Orbán and his Fidesz party began as liberal democrats in the late 1980s, and in his first stint as prime minister between 1998 and 2002, Orbán governed democratically. His autocratic about-face after returning to power in 2010 was a genuine surprise.

We should worry when a politician 1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game, 2) denies the legitimacy of opponents, 3) tolerates or encourages violence, or 4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.

In Latin America, for example, of all fifteen presidents elected in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela between 1990 and 2012, five were populist outsiders: Alberto Fujimori, Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, Lucio Gutiérrez, and Rafael Correa. All five ended up weakening democratic institutions.

Four Key Indicators of Authoritarian Behavior

1. Rejection of (or weak commitment to) democratic rules of the game Do they reject the Constitution or express a willingness to violate it? Do they suggest a need for antidemocratic measures, such as canceling elections, violating or suspending the Constitution, banning certain organizations, or restricting basic civil or political rights? Do they seek to use (or endorse the use of) extraconstitutional means to change the government, such as military coups, violent insurrections, or mass protests aimed at forcing a change in the government? Do they attempt to undermine the legitimacy of elections, for example, by refusing to accept credible electoral results?

2. Denial of the legitimacy of political opponents Do they describe their rivals as subversive, or opposed to the existing constitutional order? Do they claim that their rivals constitute an existential threat, either to national security or to the prevailing way of life? Do they baselessly describe their partisan rivals as criminals, whose supposed violation of the law (or potential to do so) disqualifies them from full participation in the political arena? Do they baselessly suggest that their rivals are foreign agents, in that they are secretly working in alliance with (or the employ of) a foreign government—usually an enemy one? 3. Toleration or encouragement of violence Do they have any ties to armed gangs, paramilitary forces, militias, guerrillas, or other organizations that engage in illicit violence?

Have they or their partisan allies sponsored or encouraged mob attacks on opponents? Have they tacitly endorsed violence by their supporters by refusing to unambiguously condemn it and punish it? Have they praised (or refused to condemn) other significant acts of political violence, either in the past or elsewhere in the world? 4. Readiness to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including media Have they supported laws or policies that restrict civil liberties, such as expanded libel or defamation laws, or laws restricting protest, criticism of the government, or certain civic or political organizations? Have they threatened to take legal or other punitive action against critics in rival parties, civil society, or the media? Have they praised repressive measures taken by other governments, either in the past or elsewhere in the world?

Democracies, after all, are not supposed to ban parties or prohibit candidates from standing for election—and we do not advocate such measures.

Successful gatekeeping requires that mainstream parties isolate and defeat extremist forces, a behavior political scientist Nancy Bermeo calls “distancing.”

First, they can keep would-be authoritarians off party ballots at election time.

Second, parties can root out extremists in the grass roots of their own ranks.

Third, prodemocratic parties can avoid all alliances with antidemocratic parties and candidates.

Fourth, prodemocratic parties can act to systematically isolate, rather than legitimize, extremists.

Finally, whenever extremists emerge as serious electoral contenders, mainstream parties must forge a united front to defeat them.

The Catholic Party adopted new propaganda and campaign tactics that targeted younger Catholics, who had formerly been part of the Rexist base.

As governor, Long built what Schlesinger described as “the nearest approach to a totalitarian state the American republic has ever seen,” using a mix of bribes and threats to bring the state’s legislature, judges, and press to heel.

Wallace engaged in what journalist Arthur Hadley called the “old and honorable American tradition of hate the powerful.”

It was not unusual for figures such as Coughlin, Long, McCarthy, and Wallace to gain the support of a sizable minority—30 or even 40 percent—of the country.

Nobody likes smoke-filled rooms today—and for good reason. They were not very democratic. Candidates were chosen by a small group of power brokers who were not accountable to the party rank and file, much less to average citizens. And smoke-filled rooms did not always produce good presidents—Harding’s term, after all, was marked by scandal.

“History will teach us,” Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers, that “of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the great number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”

The Electoral College, made up of locally prominent men in each state, would thus be responsible for choosing the president.

The Electoral College thus became our original gatekeeper. This system proved short-lived, however, due to two shortcomings in the founders’ original design. First, the Constitution is silent on the question of how presidential candidates are to be selected.

Second, the Constitution never mentions political parties.

Instead of electing local notables as delegates to the Electoral College, as the founders had envisioned, each state began to elect party loyalists. Electors became party agents, which meant that the Electoral College surrendered its gatekeeping authority to the parties.

An overreliance on gatekeeping is, in itself, undemocratic—it can create a world of party bosses who ignore the rank and file and fail to represent the people. But an overreliance on the “will of the people” can also be dangerous, for it can lead to the election of a demagogue who threatens democracy itself.

Most rank-and-file party members, especially the poor and politically unconnected, women, and minorities, were not represented in the smoke-filled rooms and were thus excluded from the presidential nomination process.

Mayors, senators, and congressional representatives knew the candidates personally. They had worked with them, under diverse conditions, over the years and were thus well-positioned to evaluate their character, judgment, and ability to operate under stress.

But if Ford harbored serious presidential ambitions, he was born a century too soon.