Democratic Hollowing: The Perils of Power Dilution and the Lessons from Peru

This event is hybrid. To register for the in-person session, click here. To register for the virtual session, click here.

Speaker: Rodrigo Barrenechea Carpio, Santo Domingo Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University; Assistant Professor at the Departamento de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Católica del Uruguay
Moderated by: Steve Levitsky, Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies

This talk will discuss the crisis of Peruvian democracy as an extreme case of 'Democratic Hollowing' in Latin America. Unlike conventional views that focus on power concentration as the natural threat to democracy, the concept of democratic hollowing instead focuses on the threats stemming from power dilution.

Rodrigo Barrenechea Carpio is a 2022/23 Santo Domingo Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, at Harvard University, and an Assistant Professor at the Departamento de Ciencias Sociales of the Universidad Católica del Uruguay. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Northwestern University. In the 2019-2020 academic year, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Center Research Cluster on Challenges to Democracy, at Harvard University. His research focuses on populism, political parties, and political representation in Latin America.

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