How Democracies Die

by Steven Levitsky

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.

Because there is no single moment—no coup, declaration of martial law, or suspension of the constitution—in which the regime obviously “crosses the line” into dictatorship, nothing may set off society’s alarm bells. Those who denounce government abuse may be dismissed as exaggerating or crying wolf. Democracy’s erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible.

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.

Democracies work best—and survive longer—where constitutions are reinforced by unwritten democratic norms. 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.

On January 30, 1933, von Papen, one of the chief architects of the plan, dismissed worries over the gamble that would make Adolf Hitler chancellor of a crisis-ridden Germany with the reassuring words: “We’ve engaged him for ourselves….Within two months, we will have pushed [him] so far into a corner that he’ll squeal.” A more profound miscalculation is hard to imagine.

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.

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. Table 1 shows how to assess politicians in terms of these four factors.

Fourth, prodemocratic parties can act to systematically isolate, rather than legitimize, extremists. This requires that politicians avoid acts—such as German Conservatives’ joint rallies with Hitler in the early 1930s or Caldera’s speech sympathizing with Chávez—that help to “normalize” or provide public respectability to authoritarian figures.

Under Perón, opposition leader Ricardo Balbín was imprisoned for “disrespecting” the president during an election campaign. Balbín appealed to the supreme court, but since Perón had packed the court, he stood no chance. In Malaysia, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad used a politically loyal police force and a packed judiciary to investigate, arrest, and imprison his leading rival, Anwar Ibrahim, on sodomy charges in the late 1990s. In Venezuela, opposition leader Leopoldo López was arrested and charged with “inciting violence” during a wave of antigovernment protest in 2014. Government officials provided no evidence of incitement, alleging at one point that it had been “subliminal.”

Because these measures are carried out piecemeal and with the appearance of legality, the drift into authoritarianism doesn’t always set off alarm bells. Citizens are often slow to realize that their democracy is being dismantled—even as it happens before their eyes.

For a demagogue who feels besieged by critics and shackled by democratic institutions, crises open a window of opportunity to silence critics and weaken rivals. Indeed, elected autocrats often need crises—external threats offer them a chance to break free, both swiftly and, very often, “legally.”

According to constitutional scholars Aziz Huq and Tom Ginsburg, only the “thin tissue of convention” prevents American presidents from capturing the referees and deploying them against opponents. Likewise, the Constitution is virtually silent on the president’s authority to act unilaterally, via decrees or executive orders, and it does not define the limits of executive power during crises.

Street basketball is not governed by rules set up by the NBA, NCAA, or any other league. And there are no referees to enforce such rules. Only shared understandings about what is, and what is not, acceptable prevent such games from descending into chaos.

Norms are more than personal dispositions. They do not simply rely on political leaders’ good character, but rather are shared codes of conduct that become common knowledge within a particular community or society—accepted, respected, and enforced by its members. Because they are unwritten, they are often hard to see, especially when they’re functioning well. This can fool us into thinking they are unnecessary. But nothing could be further from the truth. Like oxygen or clean water, a norm’s importance is quickly revealed by its absence. When norms are strong, violations trigger expressions of disapproval, ranging from head-shaking and ridicule to public criticism and outright ostracism. And politicians who violate them can expect to pay a price.

If we view our rivals as a dangerous threat, we have much to fear if they are elected. We may decide to employ any means necessary to defeat them—and therein lies a justification for authoritarian measures. Politicians who are tagged as criminal or subversive may be jailed; governments deemed to pose a threat to the nation may be overthrown.

In just about every case of democratic breakdown we have studied, would-be authoritarians—from Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini in interwar Europe to Marcos, Castro, and Pinochet during the Cold War to Putin, Chávez, and Erdoğan most recently—have justified their consolidation of power by labeling their opponents as an existential threat.

For our purposes, institutional forbearance can be thought of as avoiding actions that, while respecting the letter of the law, obviously violate its spirit. Where norms of forbearance are strong, politicians do not use their institutional prerogatives to the hilt, even if it is technically legal to do so, for such action could imperil the existing system.

When a figure such as King Richard II, portrayed as a tyrant in one of Shakespeare’s most famous historical plays, abuses his royal prerogatives in order to expropriate and plunder, his violations are not illegal; they merely violate custom.

After all, you show up at the park to play a basketball game, not to fight. In politics, this often means eschewing dirty tricks or hardball tactics in the name of civility and fair play.

The chavista court effectively incapacitated the legislature by ruling nearly all of its bills—including the amnesty law, efforts to revise the national budget, and the rejection of the state of emergency—unconstitutional.

But the opposite can also occur. The erosion of mutual toleration may motivate politicians to deploy their institutional powers as broadly as they can get away with. When parties view one another as mortal enemies, the stakes of political competition heighten dramatically. Losing ceases to be a routine and accepted part of the political process and instead becomes a full-blown catastrophe. When the perceived cost of losing is sufficiently high, politicians will be tempted to abandon forbearance. Acts of constitutional hardball may then in turn further undermine mutual toleration, reinforcing beliefs that our rivals pose a dangerous threat.

not lost on outside observers. In his two-volume masterpiece, The American Commonwealth (1888), British scholar James Bryce wrote that it was not the U.S. Constitution itself that made the American political system work but rather what he called “usages”: our unwritten rules. —

If partisan animosity prevails over mutual toleration, those in control of congress may prioritize defense of the president over the performance of their constitutional duties. In an effort to stave off opposition victory, they may abandon their oversight role, enabling the president to get away with abusive, illegal, and even authoritarian acts.

If Barack Obama is a “threat to the rule of law,” as Senator Ted Cruz claimed, then it made sense to block his judicial appointments by any means necessary.

capturing the referees, sidelining the key players, and rewriting the rules to tilt the playing field

As constitutional scholar Martin Redish put it, “If the president can immunize his agents in this manner, the courts will effectively lose any meaningful authority to protect constitutional rights against invasion by the executive branch.”