Publications by Author: Levitsky%2C%20Steven

2018
How Democracies Die
Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. 2018. How Democracies Die. Crown. Publisher's Version Abstract
Donald Trump’s presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we’d be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang—in a revolution or military coup—but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that, by electing Trump, we have already passed the first one. 

Drawing on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples, from 1930s Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, to the American South during Jim Crow, Levitsky and Ziblatt show how democracies die—and how ours can be saved.
2016
Challenges of Party-Building in Latin America
Levitsky, Steven, James Loxton, Brandon Van Dyck, and Jorge I. Domínguez, ed. 2016. Challenges of Party-Building in Latin America. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press. Publisher's Version Abstract

Nearly four decades since the onset of the third wave, political parties remain weak in Latin America: parties have collapsed in much of the region, and most new party-building efforts have failed. Why do some new parties succeed while most fail? This book challenges the widespread belief that democracy and elections naturally give rise to strong parties and argues that successful party-building is more likely to occur under conditions of intense conflict than under routine democracy. Periods of revolution, civil war, populist mobilization, or authoritarian repression crystallize partisan attachments, create incentives for organization-building, and generate a 'higher cause' that attracts committed activists. Empirically rich chapters cover diverse cases from across Latin America, including both successful and failed cases.

2011
The Resurgence of the Latin American Left
Levitsky, Steven. 2011. The Resurgence of the Latin American Left. The Johns Hopkins University Press. Publisher's Version Abstract

Latin America experienced an unprecedented wave of left-leaning governments between 1998 and 2010. This volume examines the causes of this leftward turn and the consequences it carries for the region in the twenty-first century.

The Resurgence of the Latin American Left asks three central questions: Why have left-wing parties and candidates flourished in Latin America? How have these leftist parties governed, particularly in terms of social and economic policy? What effects has the rise of the Left had on democracy and development in the region? The book addresses these questions through two sections. The first looks at several major themes regarding the contemporary Latin American Left, including whether Latin American public opinion actually shifted leftward in the 2000s, why the Left won in some countries but not in others, and how the left turn has affected market economies, social welfare, popular participation in politics, and citizenship rights. The second section examines social and economic policy and regime trajectories in eight cases: those of leftist governments in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Venezuela, as well as that of a historically populist party that governed on the right in Peru.

Featuring a new typology of Left parties in Latin America, an original framework for identifying and categorizing variation among these governments, and contributions from prominent and influential scholars of Latin American politics, this historical-institutional approach to understanding the region's left turn—and variation within it—is the most comprehensive explanation to date on the topic.

2010
Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War
Competitive authoritarian regimes—in which autocrats submit to meaningful multiparty elections but engage in serious democratic abuse—proliferated in the post–Cold War era. Based on a detailed study of 35 cases in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and post-communist Eurasia, this book explores the fate of competitive authoritarian regimes between 1990 and 2008. It finds that where social, economic, and technocratic ties to the West were extensive, as in Eastern Europe and the Americas, the external cost of abuse led incumbents to cede power rather than crack down, which led to democratization. Where ties to the West were limited, external democratizing pressure was weaker and countries rarely democratized. In these cases, regime outcomes hinged on the character of state and ruling party organizations. Where incumbents possessed developed and cohesive coercive party structures, they could thwart opposition challenges, and competitive authoritarian regimes survived; where incumbents lacked such organizational tools, regimes were unstable but rarely democratized.
2006
Levitsky, Steven, and Gretchen Helmke. 2006. Informal Institutions and Democracy: Lessons from Latin America. Johns Hopkins University Press. Publisher's Version Abstract

This volume analyzes the function of informal institutions in Latin America and how they support or weaken democratic governance. Drawing from a wide range of examples—including the Mexican dedazo, clientelism in Brazil, legislative &"ghost coalitions" in Ecuador, and elite power-sharing in Chile—the contributors examine how informal rules shape the performance of state and democratic institutions, offering fresh and timely insights into contemporary problems of governability, "unrule of law," and the absence of effective representation, participation, and accountability in Latin America. The editors present this analysis within a fourfold conceptual framework: complementary institutions, which fill gaps in formal rules or enhance their efficacy; accommodative informal institutions, which blunt the effects of dysfunctional formal institutions; competing informal institutions, which directly subvert the formal rules; and substitutive informal institutions, which replace ineffective formal institutions.

2004
Helmke, Gretchen, and Steven Levitsky. 2004. “Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics: A Research Agenda”. Abstract

Mainstream comparative research on political institutions focuses primarily on formal rules. Yet in many contexts, informal insti–tutions, ranging from bureaucratic and legislative norms to clientelism and patrimonialism, shape even more strongly political behavior and outcomes. Scholars who fail to consider these informal rules of the game risk missing many of the most important incentives and constraints that underlie political behavior. In this article we develop a framework for studying informal institutions and integrating them into comparative institutional analysis. The framework is based on a typology of four patterns of formal–informal institutional interaction: complementary, accommodating, competing, and substitutive. We then explore two issues largely ignored in the literature on this subject: the reasons and mechanisms behind the emergence of informal institutions, and the nature of their stability and change. Finally, we consider challenges in research on informal institutions, including issues of identification, measurement, and comparison.

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2003

Why did some Latin American labor-based parties adapt successfully to the contemporary challenges of neoliberalism and working class decline while others did not? Drawing on a detailed study of the Argentine Peronism, as well as a broader comparative analysis, this book develops an organizational approach to party change. Levitsky's study breaks new ground in its focus on informal and weakly institutionalized party structures. It argues that loosely structured party organizations, such as those found in many populist labor-based parties, are often better equipped to adapt to rapid environmental change than are more bureaucratic labor-based parties. The argument is illustrated in the case of Peronism, a mass labor-based party with a highly fluid internal structure. The book shows how this weakly routinized structure allowed party reformers to undertake a set of far-reached coalitional and programmatic changes that enabled Peronism to survive, and even thrive, in the neoliberal era.

Paper prepared for the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, PA, August 27–30, 2003. The authors thank Alicia Llosa, Peter Schwartzstein, Hillel Soifer, and Jonathan Taylor for their assistance in carrying out the research for this paper.

The post–Cold War literature on regime change has drawn considerable attention to the "international dimension" of democratization (Whitehead 1996a). Whereas the dominant literature on democratization during the 1980s downplayed the importance of international factors (O?Donnell and Schmitter 1986), these factors are now widely seen to have played an important – and even decisive – role in shaping post–Cold War regime outcomes (Huntington 1991; Starr 1991; Whitehead 1996a; Kopstein and Reilly 2000). Thus, scholars have highlighted the democratizing impact of the diffusion of democratic norms and institutions, the globalization of new technologies such as the internet, the increased propensity of the U.S. and other Western powers to encourage democracy abroad, the unprecedented use of political conditionality, the spread of transnational human rights and democracy networks, and an emerging international infrastructure of democracy promotion andelectoral observation.

This article uses a two–level framework to explain variation in Latin American populist parties? responses to the neoliberal challenge of the 1980s and 1990s.First,it examines the incentives for adaptation,focusing on the electoral and economic environments in which parties operated. Second,it examines parties? organizational capacity to adapt,focusing on leadership renovation and the accountability of office–holding leaders to unions and party authorities.This framework is applied to four cases:the Argentine Justicialista Party (PJ),the exican Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI),the Peruvian APRA party,and Venezuelan Democratic Action (AD). In Argentina,the combination of strong incentives and substantial adaptive capacity resulted in radical programmatic change and electoral success.In Mexico,where the PRI had high adaptive capacity but faced somewhat weaker external incentives,programmatic change was slower but nevertheless substantial,and the party survived as a major political force.In Peru,where APRA had some capacity but little incentive to adapt,and in Venezuela,where AD had neither a strong incentive nor the capacity to adapt,populist parties achieved little programmatic change and suffered steep electoral decline.

Levitsky, Steven. 2003. “Argentina Weathers the Storm”. Abstract

The events of December 2001 seemed to transform Argentina?s international status from poster child to basket case. Throughout the 1990s, Argentina had been widely hailed as a case of successful market reform under democratic government. The radical economic transformation undertaken by the government of Carlos Saúl Menem had ended hyperinflation and restored economic growth, while the country enjoyed an unprecedented degree of democratic stability. Elections were free; civil liberties were broadly protected; and the armed forces, which had toped six civilian governments since 1930, largely disappeared from the political scene. Yet in late 2001, Argentina suffered an extraordinary economic and political meltdown. A prolonged recession and a severe financial crisis culminated in a debt default, a chaotic devaluation, and a descent into the deepest depression in Argentine history. A massive wave of riots and protests triggered a strong of presidential resignations, plunging the country into a profound crisis. For several months, Argentina teetered on the brink of anarchy. Widespread hostility toward the political elite raised the specter of a Peruú or Venezuelaústyle partyúsystem collapse. As the 2003 presidential election approached, many observers feared that the vote would be marred by violence or fraud.

Published in Journal of Democracy 14, no. 4 (October 2003): 152-166.

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Political parties are critical to Latin American democracy. This was demonstrated in Peru, where an atomized, candidate–centered party system developed after Alberto Fujimori?s 1992 presidential self–coup. Party system decomposition weakened the democratic opposition against an increasingly authoritarian regime. Since the regime collapsed in 2000, prospects for party rebuilding have been mixed. Structural changes, such as the growth of the informal sector and the spread of mass media technologies, have weakened politicians? incentive to build parties. Although these changes did not cause the collapse of the party system, they may inhibit its reconstruction.

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The Argentine (Peronist) Justicialista Party (PJ)** underwent a far–reaching coalitional transformation during the 1980s and 1990s. Party reformers dismantled Peronism?s traditional mechanisms of labor participation, and clientelist networks replaced unions as the primary linkage to the working and lower classes. By the early 1990s, the PJ had transformed from a labor–dominated party into a machine party in which unions were relatively marginal actors. This process of de–unionization was critical to the PJ?s electoral and policy success during the presidency of Carlos Menem (1989–99). The erosion of union influ–ence facilitated efforts to attract middle–class votes and eliminated a key source of internal opposition to the government?s economic reforms. At the same time, the consolidation of clientelist networks helped the PJ maintain its traditional work–ing– and lower–class base in a context of economic crisis and neoliberal reform. This article argues that Peronism?s radical de–unionization was facilitated by the weakly institutionalized nature of its traditional party–union linkage. Although unions dominated the PJ in the early 1980s, the rules of the game governing their participation were always informal, fluid, and contested, leaving them vulner–able to internal changes in the distribution of power. Such a change occurred during the 1980s, when office–holding politicians used patronage resources to challenge labor?s privileged position in the party. When these politicians gained control of the party in 1987, Peronism?s weakly institutionalized mechanisms of union participation collapsed, paving the way for the consolidation of machine politics–and a steep decline in union influence–during the 1990s.

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2002
Domínguez, Jorge I, and Steven Levitsky. 2002. “U.S. Must Help Argentina Recover”. Publisher's Version Abstract

The Bush administration, like its two predecessors, has expressed strong support for democracy in the Americas. It is now time to put its money where its mouth is.

Argentina's story in the 1990s was, in many respects, exactly what the United States would like to see happen throughout the hemisphere. The country has been a democracy since 1983, its longest span of constitutional government since the 1920s.

It has undergone a major foreign policy shift. Argentina resolved territorial disputes that once brought it to the edge of war with its neighbors, dismantled programs that could have led to the development of nuclear weapons, downsized its armed forces and became one of the most reliable U.S. allies in Latin America.

Poster Child

Argentina also became a poster child for market-oriented economic reform in the 1990s. The 1991 Convertibility Law, which pegged the Argentine peso to the dollar at a one-to-one rate, ended a devastating period of hyperinflation and helped to reintegrate Argentina into the global economy. The first Bush administration was a key ally in this process, supporting Argentina politically and financially.

Yet today Argentina is bankrupt, and its hard-won democracy is in danger. Mass riots and looting left at least two dozen people dead and forced President Fernando de la Rúa to resign in December. After more riots last weekend, Adolfo Rodríguez Saá also resigned a week after being appointed interim president.

A nearly four-year-long recession has pushed the unemployment rate to almost 20 percent and, according to one study, more than three million people into poverty in the last year alone. Argentina now stands on the brink of a huge debt default and a political meltdown.

The causes of the current crisis are disputed, but most observers agree that the same convertibility scheme that had ended the hyperinflationary crisis a decade ago left Argentine governments without instruments to respond to the recession that hit the country in the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Unable to increase the money supply or devalue the currency, governments were left only with fiscal policy instruments.

The de la Rúa government was also shackled by its $132 billion debt burden. Rather than boosting the economy through a fiscal or monetary stimulus, as governments normally do, Argentine governments did the opposite in their increasingly desperate effort to sustain international financial credibility: They cut spending in the face of recession and refused to dismantle the currency peg that once ended hyperinflation.

The recession deepened, unemployment soared, poverty widened and tax revenues plummeted.

No Easy Way Out

There is no easy way out of this crisis. Indeed, any interim government will have to undertake one or both of the two Ds that its predecessor desperately sought to avoid: default and devaluation. Both options will entail massive economic and political costs.

This is where the Bush administration can help. Argentina's successful economic adjustment requires approximately $50 billion in international support for its evolving international-debt and exchange-rate policies, consistent with its economic realities and its international financial obligations.

That large sum can be assembled only with the direct, active and immediate support of the Bush administration, working with the International Monetary Fund and other governments and public and private financial institutions. One reason to assemble the large sum is to deter a worse panic.

Why should the U.S. government help soften Argentina's difficult landing? During the 1990s, Republican and Democratic administrations actively pursued the twin goals of democracy and economic integration in the Americas. Those goals are now imperiled. Argentina's further collapse would directly or indirectly damage other South American economies, provoking cumulative financial panics. And the breakdown of one of the region's largest democracies would undermine two decades of gains across the hemisphere.

Only two decades ago, dictatorship, not democracy, dominated much of Latin America. Argentina suffered six military coups between 1930 and 1976.

Since 1983, Argentines have put political violence and instability behind them. Presidents are now regularly and freely elected, and power has passed peacefully several times from government to opposition. Civil liberties are now widely respected, and the country possesses a vibrant free press and civil society.

Losing Hope

The current crisis threatens to undo these democratic gains. After four years of recession, Argentines are beginning to lose hope. Trust in government has eroded. Many citizens no longer believe their elected leaders are able to address their most pressing problems.

The de la Rúa 2-year-old government suffered such a dramatic loss of support because it was increasingly perceived to be sacrificing its citizens' well-being to meet the demands of financial markets. In his wake, Rodríguez Saá's grace period lasted only a week.

The danger today is that frustration has spread to include the entire political elite, and perhaps even Argentina's political institutions—patterns similar to those that gave rise to Alberto Fujimori in Peru and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. If that occurs, the prospects for democracy will dim considerably.

It has not come to that yet. Neither de la Rúa's or Rodríguez Saá's resignation was a military coup, and no Argentine Hugo Chávez has yet emerged. No one doubts that the election to choose de la Rúa's successor will be free and fair. But if Argentina is to steer clear of a Venezuela-like fate, its new government must deliver economic solutions to Argentines. To do so, it will require external assistance.

A successful model of such U.S.-backed support was tested in Mexico. The U.S. government's decision to organize a financial assistance package to help Mexico address the 1994-95 financial panic was bold and politically risky. But it clearly worked. A worse panic was deterred, economic growth was soon restored and Mexico made an impressive transition to democracy.

Argentina deserves similar help. Few, if any, Latin American countries combined democracy and market reforms as successfully as Argentina did in the 1990s.

Argentine democracy has proven remarkably resilient, weathering hyperinflation and radical economic reform. But if something is not done soon to give Argentines a realistic expectation that their politicians and democratic institutions can provide solutions to their problems, someone else will try to convince them that those politicians and those institutions are themselves the problem.

If that happens, U.S. interests will suffer badly in Argentina and elsewhere in the Americas.

This paper examines one type of hybrid regime, which we call competitive authoritarianism. Such regimes are authoritarian in that they do not meet standard procedural minimum criteria for democracy. Elections are often unfair and civil liberties are frequently violated. However, they are competitive in that democratic institutions are more facades. Rather, they permit opposition groups to contest seriously for–and sometimes even win–power. The combination of autocratic rule and democratic rules creates an inherent source of tension. Consequently, competitive authoritarian regimes are characterized by periodic crises in which opposition challenges force incumbents to choose between cracking down and losing power. These crises have resulted in a variety of outcomes, ranging from authoritarian entrenchment (Malaysia, Zimbabwe) to incumbent turnover without regime change (Ukraine, Zambia) to democratization (Peru, Serbia).

Paper prepared for Mapping the Great Zone: Clientelism and the Boundary between Democratic and Democratizing conference, Columbia University, April 4–5, 2003. [This is a revised version of a paper prepared for the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston, MA, August 28-31, 2002.]