Is democracy dying? What challenges do democracies around the world face nowadays? How can they overcome such challenges? To answer these questions, Pedro Pinto interviews Daniel Ziblatt in this episode of “It’s Not That Simple”, a podcast by the Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation.

An expert on democracy, Ziblatt is Eaton Professor of Government at Harvard University and is director of the Transformations of Democracy research unit at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center in Berlin, Germany. His three books include How_Democracies_Die (Crown, 2018), co-authored with Steve Levitsky), a New York Times best-seller, translated into twenty-two languages. He is also the author of Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2017), an account of Europe's historical democratization, which won the American Political Science Association's 2018 Woodrow Wilson Prize for the best book in government and international relations and American Sociological Association's 2018 Barrington Moore Prize. In recent years he has been a fellow or visiting professor at the European University Institute (Florence, Italy), Center for Advanced Study (Stanford), Max Planck Institute (Cologne), University of Munich, and the Ecole Normale Superieure (Paris).

In this episode, Ziblatt identifies the warning signs of when a democracy is being threatened, not by a coup, but by authoritarian politicians “chipping away” at its foundations from within. He also gives examples of countries where democracy is in good health. Ziblatt then looks at the impact of the Russian
war against Ukraine in the world’s democracies and what the future might hold. He addresses the failed attempts – in the US and in Brazil – to overturn the
result of their presidential elections, and what they say about the future of democracy there and around the world. Finally, Ziblatt turns to Portugal and the rise of its populist far-right, discussing how mainstream parties in Western democracies can deal with that threat, in a conversation well worth listening to.

More on this topic:  

• How Democracies Die, Daniel Ziblatt (with Steven Levitsky), 2018

• Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, Daniel Ziblatt, 2017

• Daniel Ziblatt on "The Causes of Populism and the Problem of Cultural Majority Rights"

• Daniel Ziblatt (with Alper Yagci and Muharrem Aytug Sasmaz) on “"How Voters Respond to Presidential Assaults on Checks and Balances: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Turkey"

• Daniel Ziblatt (with Rachel Riedl, Dan Slater, and Joseph Wong) on "Authoritarian-Led Democratization"

• A piece about the book “How Democracies Die”

• An interview with Daniel Ziblatt about the state of American democracy

• Podcast It’s Not That Simple, “Political Polarization”, with Ezra Klein

• Podcast It’s Not That Simple, “Elections”, with Nate Silver

• Podcast It’s Not That Simple, “(I)liberal Democracy”, with Catherine de Vries

• An interview with historian Timothy Snyder about democracy

Other references in Portuguese:  

• Podcast [IN] Pertinente “Estará ameaçada a democracia?” with Pedro Vieira and Raquel Vaz Pinto

• Essay of the Foundation “A Qualidade da Democracia em Portugal”, by Conceição Pequito Teixeira, 2018

• “Instituições e qualidade da democracia: cultura política na Europa do Sul”, a study by the Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation, coordinated by Tiago Fernandes