Steven Levitsky Quotes

The whole South—every state in the South—had got into the hands of the very men that had held us as slaves.

There is one thing more powerful than the Constitution….That’s the will of the people. What is a Constitution anyway? They’re the products of the people, the people are the first source of power, and...

To better understand how elected autocrats subtly undermine institutions, it’s helpful to imagine a soccer game. To consolidate power, would-be authoritarians must capture the referees, sideline at le...

Under President Trump, America has been defining political deviancy down. The president’s routine use of personal insult, bullying, lying, and cheating has, inevitably, helped to normalize such practi...

We know that extremist demagogues emerge from time to time in all societies, even in healthy democracies. The United States has had its share of them, including Henry Ford, Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy,...

White evangelicals—who had leaned Democratic in the 1960s—began to vote Republican. In 2016, 76 percent of white evangelicals identified as Republican. Democratic voters, in turn, grew increasingly se...

With tactics like these, the Republicans had begun to behave like an antisystem political party. By the end of the Obama presidency, democracy’s soft guardrails were becoming dangerously unmoored.

Years after Chávez’s presidential victory, Rafael Caldera explained his mistakes simply: Nobody thought that Mr. Chávez had even the remotest chance of becoming president. And merely a day after Hitle...

You’re fighting a war. It is a war for power….This party does not need another generation of cautious, prudent, careful, bland, irrelevant quasi-leaders….What we really need are people who are willing...

Governments prefer to co-opt popular cultural figures or reach a mutual accommodation with them, allowing them to continue their work as long as they stay out of politics.

The changing media landscape had a stronger impact on the Republican Party. Republican voters rely more heavily on partisan media outlets than do Democrats.

A poll taken prior to the 2012 presidential election found that 71 percent of Mexicans believed that fraud could be in play.

A stunning 385 filibusters were initiated between 2007 and 2012—equal to the total number of filibusters in the seven decades between World War I and the end of the Reagan administration.

By contrast, when the government’s approval rating is low, media and opposition grow more brazen, judges become emboldened to stand up to the president, and allies begin to dissent.

Even if Democrats were to succeed in weakening or removing President Trump via hardball tactics, their victory would be Pyrrhic—for they would inherit a democracy stripped of its remaining protective...

Even if Donald Trump does not break the hard guardrails of our constitutional democracy, he has increased the likelihood that a future president will.

Governments that cannot remove independent judges may bypass them through court packing. In Hungary, for instance, the Orbán government expanded the size of the Constitutional Court from eight to fift...

In his two-volume masterpiece, The American Commonwealth (1888), British scholar James Bryce wrote that it was not the U.S. Constitution itself that made the American political system work but rather...

Norm breaking was also evident at the state level. Among the most notorious cases was the 2003 Texas redistricting plan.

Party gatekeepers failed at three key junctures: the invisible primary, the primaries themselves, and the general election.