How Democracies Die

by Steven Levitsky

For a presidential democracy to succeed, institutions that are muscular enough to check the president must routinely underuse that power. In the absence of these norms, this balance becomes harder to sustain. When partisan hatred trumps politicians’ commitment to the spirit of the Constitution, a system of checks and balances risks being subverted in two ways. Under divided government, where legislative or judicial institutions are in the hands of the opposition, the risk is constitutional hardball, in which the opposition deploys its institutional prerogatives as far as it can extend them—defunding the government, blocking all presidential judicial appointments, and perhaps even voting to remove the president. In this scenario, legislative and judicial watchdogs become partisan attack dogs.