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Speaker: Susan Stokes, Blake Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science; Director, Chicago Center on Democracy, University of Chicago
Moderated by: Steve Levitsky, Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies
Using cross-national statistical evidence, we show that income inequality robustly increases democracies’ chances of backsliding, helping to explain the wave of democratic erosion occurring on the heels of the neoliberal era. Institutions also play a role: when leaders sit atop presidential systems, democracy is more likely to erode than when they sit atop parliamentary systems.
Susan Stokes is Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago and serves as Faculty Director of the Chicago Center on Democracy. She earlier served as Chair of the Political Science Department and of the Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies at Yale. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Stokes’s publications focus on democratization, the quality of democracy, political parties, and electoral behavior. Her single- and co-authored books include Why Bother? Rethinking Participation in Elections and Protests (Cambridge 2019), Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism (Cambridge 2013), and Mandates and Democracy (Cambridge 2001). She is co-editor of Political Representation (Cambridge 2009), Designing Democratic Institutions (Russell Sage Foundation 2008), the Oxford Handbook on Comparative Politics (Oxford 2007), and Democracy, Accountability, and Representation (Cambridge 1999). Stokes is currently working on a book on democratic erosion and another on direct democracy.
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