Prof. Steve Levitsky (Harvard University) will be giving a talk on How Democracies Die on April 18th at 5pm in Oak Hall 101. The event is sponsored by the Gerson Foreign Policy Lectureship Fund and the Department of Political Science and is also an honors event. The talk is free and open to the public.
The talk will discuss the process by which democracies slide into authoritarianism, building on historical examples from Europe and Latin America, with an emphasis on elite acceptance of democratic norms. The speaker will then look at recent events in the United States and Europe where those norms are under threat.
Steven Levitsky is Professor of Government at Harvard University. His research interests include political parties, authoritarianism and democratization, populism, and weak and informal institutions, with a focus on Latin America. Among his many publications he is author of Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (2003), co-author (with Lucan Way) of Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (2010), and co-author (With Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die (2018).
For more information, contact: Matthew Singer at matthew.m.singer@uconn.edu