Steven Levitsky


Steven Robert Levitsky is an American political scientist and professor of government at Harvard University and a senior fellow for democracy at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also a senior fellow at the Kettering Foundation, an American non-partisan research foundation.
A comparative political scientist, his research interests focus on Latin America and include political parties and party systems, authoritarianism and democratization, and weak and informal institutions.
He is notable for his work on competitive authoritarian regimes and informal political institutions. An expert on Latin America, Levitsky co-authored the 2018 best seller How Democracies Die with Daniel Ziblatt, warning that Donald Trump and the Republican Party were engaging in rhetoric and actions that have parallels with the breakdown of democracy in other regions and historical periods.

Early life

Levitsky was raised in Ithaca, New York. His father was a professor of psychology at Cornell University.
He studied Spanish in high school and became aware of the Reagan administration policies toward Central America. As an undergraduate, he took some courses about Latin America and "fell in love with the region". In the summer of 1989, he visited Managua, Nicaragua, to do research for his senior thesis.
Levitsky received a B.A. in political science from Stanford University in 1990 and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1999.

Academic career

Career

After obtaining his Ph.D. in 1999, Levitsky was a visiting fellow at the University of Notre Dame's Kellogg Institute for International Studies.
The next year, he joined Harvard University as an assistant professor of government. There he went on to serve as the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences before receiving tenure as a full professor of government in 2008. Although he had enjoyed living and studying in the San Francisco Bay Area, he always identified more strongly with the East Coast and was happy to return east when he joined Harvard.
At Harvard, Levitsky also sits on the executive committees of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.
He is an advisor to several student organizations, including the Harvard Association Cultivating Inter-American Democracy.

Research

Levitsky is known for his work with University of Toronto professor Lucan Way on "competitive authoritarian" regimes: hybrid government types in which, on the one hand, democratic institutions are generally accepted as the means to obtaining and exercising political power, but, on the other hand, incumbents violate the norms of those institutions so routinely, and to such an extent, that the regime fails to meet basic standards for democracy; under such a system, incumbents almost always retain power, because they control and tend to use the state to squelch opposition, arresting or intimidating opponents, controlling media coverage, or tampering with election results. Writing about the phenomenon in 2002, Levitsky and Way named Serbia under Slobodan Milošević and Russia under Vladimir Putin as examples of such regimes. When collaborating, Levitsky brings his expertise on Latin America while Way brings his on countries of the former Soviet Union.
In 2018, Levitsky published How Democracies Die with fellow Harvard professor Daniel Ziblatt. The book examines the conditions that may lead democracies to break down from within, rather than due to external events such as military coups or foreign invasions. How Democracies Die received widespread praise. It spent a number of weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list and six weeks on the non-fiction bestseller list of the German weekly Der Spiegel. The book was recognized as one of the best nonfiction books of 2018 by the Washington Post, Time, and Foreign Affairs. Levitsky and Ziblatt have co-authored numerous opinion articles on American democracy in the New York Times.

Personal life

Levitsky is married to Liz Mineo, a Peruvian journalist with degrees from the National University of San Marcos and Columbia University who currently works at The Harvard Gazette. They live with their daughter in Brookline, Massachusetts. Levitsky is Jewish.

Awards and honors

Books

  • 2023. Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point.. New York. Crown.
  • 2022. Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism.. Princeton University Press.
  • 2018. How Democracies Die.. New York: Crown.. – NDR Kultur Sachbuchpreis 2018; Goldsmith Book Prize 2019
  • 2010. Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War.. New York: Cambridge University Press..
  • 2006. Informal Institutions and Democracy: Lessons from Latin America.. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press..
  • 2005. Argentine Democracy: The Politics of Institutional Weakness.. University Park: Penn State University Press..
  • 2003. Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press..

    Journal articles

  • 2025. "The Path to American Authoritarianism: What Comes After Democratic Breakdown". Foreign Affairs. 11 February 2025.
  • 2009. “Variation in Institutional Strength: Causes and Implications”. Annual Review of Political Science. 12: 115-133.
  • 2007. "Organizacion Informal de los Partidos en America Latina" . Desarrollo Económico 46, No. 184: 539-568.
  • 2007. “Linkage, Leverage and the Post-Communist Divide”. East European Politics and Societies 27, No. 21: 48-66.
  • 2006. “The Dynamics of Autocratic Coercive Capacity after the Cold War”. Communist and Post-Communist Studies 39, No. 3: 387-410.
  • 2006. “Organized Labor and Democracy in Latin America”. Comparative Politics 39, No. 1 : 21-42.
  • 2006. “Linkage versus Leverage: Rethinking the International Dimension of Regime Change”. Comparative Politics 38, No. 4 : 379-400.
  • 2005. “International Linkage and Democratization”. Journal of Democracy. 16, No. 3 : 20-34.
  • 2004. “Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics: A Research Agenda”. Perspectives on Politics 2, No. 4 : 725-740.
  • 2003. “Argentina Weathers the Storm”. Journal of Democracy 14, No. 4 : 152-166.
  • 2003. “From Labor Politics to Machine Politics: The Transformation of Party-Union Linkages in Argentine Peronism, 1983-99.” Latin American Research Review 38, No. 3: 3-36.
  • 2003. “Explaining Populist Party Adaptation in Latin America: Environmental and Organizational Determinants of Party Change in Argentina, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela”. Comparative Political Studies 36, No. 8 : 859-880.
  • 2003. “Democracy without Parties? Political Parties and Regime Change in Fujimori's Peru”. Latin American Politics and Society 45, No. 3 : 1-33.
  • 2002. . Journal of Democracy 13, No. 2 : 51-66.
  • 2001. “Organization and Labor-Based Party Adaptation: The Transformation of Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective.” World Politics 54, No. 1 : 27-56.
  • 2001. “Inside the Black Box: Recent Studies of Latin American Party Organizations.” Studies in Comparative International Development 36, No. 2 : 92-110.
  • 2001. “An ‘Organized Disorganization’: Informal Organization and the Persistence of Local Party Structures in Argentine Peronism.” Journal of Latin American Studies 33, No. 1 : 29-66.
  • 2000. “The ‘Normalization’ of Argentine Politics.” Journal of Democracy 11, No. 2 : 56-69.
  • 1999. “Fujimori and Post-Party Politics in Peru.” Journal of Democracy 10, No. 3 : 78-92.
  • 1998. “Crisis, Party Adaptation, and Regime Stability in Argentina: The Case of Peronism, 1989-1995.” Party Politics 4, No. 4: 445-470.
  • 1998. “Between a Shock and a Hard Place: The Dynamics of Labor-Backed Adjustment in Argentina and Poland”. Comparative Politics 30, No. 2 : 171-192.
  • 1998. “Institutionalization and Peronism: The Case, the Concept, and the Case for Unpacking the Concept.” Party Politics 4, No. 1 : 77-92.
  • 1997. “Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research”, World Politics 49, No. 3 : 430-51.
  • 1991. “FSLN Congress: A Cautious First Step.” Journal of Communist Studies 7, No. 4 : 539-544.