How Democracies Die

by Steven Levitsky

When American democracy has worked, it has relied upon two norms that we often take for granted—mutual tolerance and institutional forbearance. Treating rivals as legitimate contenders for power and underutilizing one’s institutional prerogatives in the spirit of fair play are not written into the American Constitution. Yet without them, our constitutional checks and balances will not operate as we expect them to. When French thinker Baron de Montesquieu pioneered the notion of separation of powers in his 1748 work The Spirit of the Laws, he worried little about what we today call norms. Montesquieu believed the hard architecture of political institutions might be enough to constrain overreaching power—that constitutional design was not unlike an engineering problem, a challenge of crafting institutions so that ambition could be used to counteract ambition, even when political leaders were flawed. Many of our founders believed this, as well.