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Speaker: Javier Corrales, Dwight W. Morrow 1895 Professor of Political Science, Amherst College
Moderated by: Steve Levitsky, Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies
Presidents engaged in democratic backsliding often pursue extremist public policies. I will discuss the origins of this extremism. Extremist policies provoke or intensify polarization, which in turn, can help backsliding presidents consolidate support and, paradoxically, weaken the opposition. Extremist policies, together with polarization, can thus help presidents achieve backsliding. I will illustrate this argument with cases from Latin America and Europe.
Javier Corrales is Dwight W. Morrow 1895 professor of Political Science at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He obtained his PhD in political science from Harvard University in 1996. Corrales's research focuses on democratization, presidential powers, ruling parties, democratic backsliding, political economy of development, foreign policies, and sexuality in Latin America and the Caribbean. His book, Autocracy Rising (Brookings Institution Press, spring 2023), discusses the transition to authoritarianism in Venezuela since the 2010s, with comparisons to Colombia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua. It argues that democratic backsliding is determined by party system features, variations in autocratic legalism, institutional capture, and innovations in the use of coercion.
Steven Levitsky is the Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. As the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government, his research focuses on democratization, authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions. He is author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die (Crown, 2018), a New York Times Best-Seller that has been published in 25 languages, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge, 2010), and Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, 2003), and co -editor of Informal Institutions and Democracy in Latin America (with Gretchen Helmke) and The Resurgence of the Latin American Left (with Kenneth Roberts). He has written frequently for the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Vox, The New Republic, The Monkey Cage, La República (Peru) and Folha de São Paulo (Brazil). He is currently writing a book (with Lucan Way) on the durability of revolutionary regimes. Levitsky received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
Presented in collaboration with Weatherhead Center for International Affairs