Steven Levitsky Quote

Norms are the soft guardrails of democracy; as they break down, the zone of acceptable political behavior expands, giving rise to discourse and action that could imperil democracy.

Steven Levitsky

Norms are the soft guardrails of democracy; as they break down, the zone of acceptable political behavior expands, giving rise to discourse and action that could imperil democracy.

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About Steven Levitsky

Steven Robert Levitsky (born January 17, 1968) 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 best seller How Democracies Die with Daniel Ziblatt (an expert on authoritarianism in interwar Europe), 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.