How Democracies Die

by Steven Levitsky

By capturing the referees, buying off or enfeebling opponents, and rewriting the rules of the game, elected leaders can establish a decisive—and permanent—advantage over their opponents. Because these measures are carried out piecemeal and with the appearance of legality, the drift

Perhaps the best-known case is Adolf Hitler’s response to the February 27, 1933, Reichstag fire, just a month after he was sworn in as chancellor. The question of whether a young Dutchman with communist sympathies started the fire in the Berlin parliament building or whether the Nazi leadership itself did remains a matter of debate among historians. Whatever the case, Hitler, Hermann Göring, and Joseph Goebbels arrived at the burning Reichstag and immediately used the event to justify emergency decrees that dismantled civil liberties.

July 2016 coup attempt, which provided justification for a wide-ranging crackdown. Erdoğan responded to the coup by declaring a state of emergency and launching a massive wave of repression that included a purge of some 100,000 public officials, the closure of several newspapers, and more than 50,000 arrests—including hundreds of judges and prosecutors, 144 journalists, and even two members of the Constitutional Court. Erdoğan also used the coup attempt as a window of opportunity to make the case for sweeping new executive powers. The power grab culminated in the April 2017 passage of a constitutional amendment that demolished checks on presidential authority.

President Richard Nixon’s illegal wiretapping, exposed after the 1972 Watergate break-in, triggered a high-profile congressional investigation and bipartisan pressure for a special prosecutor that eventually forced his resignation in the face of certain impeachment. In these and other instances, our political institutions served as crucial bulwarks against authoritarian tendencies.

Constitutional rules are also always subject to competing interpretations. What, exactly, does “advice and consent” entail when it comes to the U.S. Senate’s role in appointing Supreme Court justices? What sort of threshold for impeachment does the phrase “crimes and misdemeanors” establish? Americans have debated these and other constitutional questions for centuries. If constitutional powers are open to multiple readings, they can be used in ways that their creators didn’t anticipate.

Because of the gaps and ambiguities inherent in all legal systems, we cannot rely on constitutions alone to safeguard democracy against would-be authoritarians. “God has never endowed any statesman or philosopher, or any body of them,” wrote former U.S. president Benjamin Harrison, “with wisdom enough to frame a system of government that everybody could go off and leave.”

If the constitution written in Philadelphia in 1787 is not what secured American democracy for so long, then what did? Many factors mattered, including our nation’s immense wealth, a large middle class, and a vibrant civil society. But we believe much of the answer also lies in the development of strong democratic norms.

in all facets of society, ranging from family life to the operation of businesses and universities, unwritten rules loom large in politics.

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.

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.

But two norms stand out as fundamental to a functioning democracy: mutual toleration and institutional forbearance.

Mutual toleration refers to the idea that as long as our rivals play by constitutional rules, we accept that they have an equal right to exist, compete for power, and govern. We may disagree with, and even strongly dislike, our rivals, but we nevertheless accept them as legitimate. This means recognizing that our political rivals are decent, patriotic, law-abiding citizens—that they love our country and respect the Constitution just as we do. It means that even if we believe our opponents’ ideas to be foolish or wrong-headed, we do not view them as an existential threat.

mutual toleration is politicians’ collective willingness to agree to disagree.

Both sides in America’s early partisan battles—John Adams’s Federalists and Thomas Jefferson’s Republicans—regarded each other as a threat to the republic. The Federalists saw themselves as the embodiment of the Constitution; in their view, one could not oppose the Federalists without opposing the entire American project. So when Jefferson and Madison organized what would become the Republican Party, the Federalists regarded them as traitors,

The Jeffersonians, for their part, accused the Federalists of being Tories and of plotting a British-backed monarchic restoration. Each side hoped to vanquish the other, taking steps (such as the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts) to legally punish mere political opposition. Partisan conflict was so ferocious that many feared the new republic would fail. It was only gradually, over the course of decades, that America’s opposing parties came to the hard-fought recognition that they could be rivals rather than enemies, circulating in power rather than destroying each other. This recognition was a critical foundation for American democracy.

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.

A second norm critical to democracy’s survival is what we call institutional forbearance. Forbearance means “patient self-control; restraint and tolerance,” or “the action of restraining from exercising a legal right.” For our purposes, institutional forbearance can be thought of as avoiding actions that, while respecting the letter of the law, obviously violate its spirit.

The opposite of forbearance is to exploit one’s institutional prerogatives in an unrestrained way. Legal scholar Mark Tushnet calls this “constitutional hardball”: playing by the rules but pushing against their bounds and “playing for keeps.”

Argentina’s 1853 constitution was ambiguous in defining the president’s authority to issue decrees. Historically, elected presidents had used this authority sparingly, issuing just twenty-five decrees between 1853 and 1989. Menem showed no such restraint, issuing 336 decrees in less than a single presidential term.

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.

The result is politics without guardrails—what political theorist Eric Nelson describes as a “cycle of escalating constitutional brinksmanship.” What does such politics look like? Nelson offers an example: the collapse of Charles I’s monarchy in England during the 1640s.

“The spiral of legislative obstruction and royal overreaching continued until it could be resolved only by war.” The civil war that ensued dismantled the English monarchy and cost Charles his life.

Some of history’s most tragic democratic breakdowns were preceded by the degrading of basic norms. One example can be found in Chile. Prior to the 1973 coup, Chile had been Latin America’s oldest and most successful democracy, sustained by vibrant democratic norms. Even though Chilean political parties ranged from a Marxist left to a reactionary right, a “culture of compromise” predominated throughout much of the twentieth century.

Beginning in the 1960s, however, Chile’s culture of compromise was strained by Cold War polarization. Some on the left, inspired by the Cuban Revolution, began to dismiss the country’s tradition of political give and take as a bourgeois anachronism. Many on the right began to fear that if the leftist Popular Unity coalition gained power, it would turn Chile into another Cuba. By the 1970 presidential election, these tensions had reached extreme levels.

Partisan hostility intensified over the course of Allende’s presidency. His leftist allies took to describing opponents as fascists and “enemies of the people,” while rightists described the government as totalitarian. The growing mutual intolerance undermined efforts by Allende and the Christian Democrats to negotiate any sort of modus vivendi: Whereas Allende’s radical allies viewed such negotiations as “opening the door to fascism,” right-wing groups criticized Christian Democrats for not resisting the communist threat.

but by early 1973 the Christian Democrats had decided, in the words of party leader Patricio Aylwin, to “not let Allende score a single goal.”

Polarization can destroy democratic norms. When socioeconomic, racial, or religious differences give rise to extreme partisanship, in which societies sort them...

most open-ended enumerated power the Constitution offered him as president—war powers—to confront a domestic crisis. Roosevelt concluded that even this wasn’t enough. In November 1936, he was reelected with 61 percent of the vote—the largest popular presidential mandate in American history. But he found his ambitious policy agenda straitjacketed by an unexpected source: the conservative (and, in his view, backward-looking) Supreme Court—a

The president’s motivation was, perhaps, understandable—he sought a more secure legal basis to achieve the goals of the New Deal. Had it passed, however, it would have set a dangerous precedent. The Court would have become hyperpoliticized, its membership, size, and selection rules open to constant manipulation, not unlike Argentina under Perón or Venezuela under Chávez. Had Roosevelt passed his judicial act, a key norm—that presidents should not undermine another coequal branch—would have been demolished.

In 1798, the Federalists passed the Sedition Act, which, though purportedly criminalizing false statements against the government, was so vague that it virtually criminalized criticism of the government. The act was used to target Republican Party newspapers and activists. In the 1800 election, which pitted President Adams, a Federalist, against Jefferson, the leader of the Republican opposition, each side aimed for a permanent victory—to put the other party out of business forever. Federalist leader Alexander Hamilton talked of finding a “legal and constitutional step” to block Jefferson’s ascent to the presidency, while Jefferson described the election as a last opportunity to save America from monarchy.

The post-Revolutionary generation grew accustomed to the idea that one sometimes wins and sometimes loses in politics—and that rivals need not be enemies. Typical of this new view was Martin Van Buren, a founder of the modern Democratic Party and later U.S. president. According to Richard Hofstadter, Van Buren typified the spirit of the amiable county courthouse lawyer translated to politics, the lawyer who may enjoy over a period of many years a series of animated courtroom duels with an antagonist, but who sustains outside the courtroom the mutual respect, often the genial friendship, of the co-professional.

President Lincoln famously suspended habeas corpus and issued constitutionally dubious executive orders, though, of course, one notable executive order freed the slaves. And following the Union victory, much of the former Confederacy was placed under military rule.

The trauma of the Civil War left Americans with searing questions about what went wrong. The sheer destruction—including more than 600,000 dead—shattered many northern intellectuals’ belief in the superiority of their form of democracy. Was the U.S. Constitution not the providentially inspired document it had been thought to be? This wave of self-examination gave rise to a new interest in unwritten rules. In 1885, the then–political science professor Woodrow Wilson, the son of a southern Confederate family, published a book about Congress that explored the disparity between the promise of constitutional arrangements and the way institutions really worked.

addition to good laws, America needed ef...

With enduring partisan animosity came constitutional hardball. In 1866, the Republican Congress reduced the size of the Supreme Court from ten to seven to prevent President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat whom Republicans viewed as subverting Reconstruction, from making any appointments, and a year later, it passed the Tenure of Office Act, which prohibited Johnson from removing Lincoln’s cabinet members without Senate approval. Viewing the law as a violation of his constitutional authority, Johnson ignored it—a “high misdemeanor” for which he was impeached in 1868.

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. Such a transformation from watchdog into lapdog—think of Perón’s acquiescent congress in Argentina or the chavista supreme court in Venezuela—can be an important enabler of authoritarian rule.

U.S. presidents, congressional leaders, and Supreme Court justices enjoy a range of powers that, if deployed without restraint, could undermine the system.

Likewise, presidents can circumvent the judiciary, either by refusing to abide by court rulings, as Lincoln did when the Supreme Court rejected his suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, or by using the prerogative of the presidential pardon. Alexander Hamilton argued in Federalist 74 that because the power of pardon was so far-reaching, it would “naturally inspire scrupulousness and caution.” But in the hands of a president without scruples or caution, the pardon can be used to thoroughly shield the government from judicial checks. The president can even pardon himself. Such action, though constitutional, would undermine the independence of the judiciary.

Consider Theodore Roosevelt, who ascended to the office in 1901 after President William McKinley’s assassination. Roosevelt subscribed to what he called the stewardship theory of the presidency, which asserted that all executive actions were allowed unless expressly prohibited by law. This expansive view of presidential power, Roosevelt’s fondness for populist-style appeals to “the people,” and his “boundless energy and ambition” alarmed contemporary observers, including leaders of his own Republican Party. President McKinley’s powerful advisor, Mark Hanna, had warned against selecting Roosevelt as his vice president, reportedly saying, “Don’t you realize that there’s only one life between that madman and the White House?” As president, however, Roosevelt acted with surprising restraint. He took great care, for example, to avoid appearing to bully Congress by speaking directly to the people or attacking individual members of Congress as they debated crucial votes. In the end, Roosevelt operated well within the bounds of our constitutional checks and balances.

The only instance of Supreme Court impeachment in American history occurred in 1804, when the Republican-dominated House of Representatives voted to impeach Justice Samuel Chase, an “ardent Federalist” who had campaigned against Jefferson and criticized him during his presidency. Viewing Chase’s behavior as sedition, Jefferson pushed for his impeachment. Although Republicans tried to wrap the move in legality, the impeachment was, by all accounts, a “political persecution from beginning to end.” The Senate acquitted Chase, setting a powerful precedent

Matthews’s seminal study of the U.S. Senate during the late 1950s highlights how informal norms, or what he called “folkways,” helped the institution function. Two of these folkways are closely associated with forbearance: courtesy and reciprocity. Courtesy meant, first and foremost, avoiding personal or embarrassing attacks on fellow senators. The cardinal rule, Matthews observed, was for senators to not let “political disagreements influence personal feelings.” This was difficult, for, as one senator put it, “it is hard not to call a man a liar when you know he is one.” But senators viewed courtesy as critical to their success, since, as one senator put it, “your enemies on one issue may be your friends on the next.” In the words of another senator, political self-preservation “dictates at least a semblance of friendship. And then before you know it, you really are friends.”

“If a senator does push his formal power to the limit, he has broken the implicit bargain and can expect, not cooperation from his colleagues, but only retaliation in kind,” making legislative work much more difficult. As one senator described the norm, “It’s not a matter of friendship; it’s just a matter of, ‘I won’t be an S.O.B. if you won’t be one.’ ”

No institutional tool illustrates the importance of these norms more clearly than the filibuster.

Though available to any senator, at any time, most senators treated the filibuster as a “procedural weapon of last resort.” According to one count, only twenty-three manifest filibusters occurred during the entire nineteenth century.

Another congressional prerogative central to the system of checks and balances is the Senate’s power of “advice and consent” over presidential appointments to the Supreme Court and other key positions. Though stipulated in the Constitution, the actual scope of the Senate’s advice and consent role is open to interpretation and debate. In theory, the Senate could block presidents from appointing any of their preferred cabinet members or justices—an act that, though nominally constitutional, would hobble the government. This has not happened, in part, because of an established Senate norm of deferring to presidents to fill their cabinets and open Supreme Court seats. Only

Highly qualified nominees were invariably approved even when senators disagreed with them ideologically. The ultraconservative Antonin Scalia, a Reagan appointee, was approved in 1986 by a vote of 98 to 0, despite the fact that the Democrats had more than enough votes (47) to filibuster.

Finally, one of the most potentially explosive prerogatives granted to Congress by the Constitution is the power to remove a sitting president via impeachment.

Roosevelt’s presidency never slid into autocracy, however. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is that many of Roosevelt’s executive excesses triggered bipartisan resistance. The court-packing scheme was rejected by both parties, and although Roosevelt destroyed the unwritten rule limiting presidents to two terms in office, support for the old norm was so strong that in 1947, less than two years after his death, a bipartisan coalition in Congress passed the Twenty-Second Amendment, which enshrined it in the Constitution. The guardrails were tested during the Roosevelt era, but they held.

McCarthyism posed the second significant challenge to America’s institutions, threatening norms of mutual toleration in the early 1950s.

Between 1946 and 1954, anticommunism found its way into partisan politics. The advent of the Cold War had created a frenzy over national security, and the Republican Party, which had been out of national power for nearly twenty years, was searching desperately for a new electoral appeal. Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy found such an appeal. First elected to the Senate in 1947, McCarthy took the national stage on February 9, 1950, with an infamous speech in front of the Ohio County Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia. McCarthy ranted against communism and the presence of “traitors” within, and then stumbled onto a line that instantly became iconic: “I have here in my hand a list of 205 names that were made known to the Secretary of State and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.”