Harvard University professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than 20 years researching authoritarian regimes, the emergence of dictators, and efforts to overturn elections all around the world, including France, Spain, Ukraine, Russia, the Philippines, Peru, and Venezuela. Levitsky is a Latin Americanist and Ziblatt specializes in European nation-building.

Through their lectures and books, Levitsky and Ziblatt sound the alarm on the growing threat to democracy around the world, including in the US, and the ways in which citizens can shore up their democracies. Most people believe coup d’états, angry mobs, and revolutions dismantle democracies. Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that this notion is a myth: Instead, they use historical and current examples to argue that the rise of authoritarianism is often slow-building. Moreover, elected leaders who care more about their political careers than democracy (whom the authors refer to as “semi-loyal democrats”) cause the death of democracies.

In their first book entitled How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times bestseller, Levitsky and Ziblatt explore through a historical and contemporary analysis how the weakening of democratic norms and institutions by elected leaders around the world gives rise to authoritarian regimes. The authors note that, in 2016, the US seemed on the verge of becoming a multiracial democracy.