September 18, 2025. 12 PM EST
Season Finale: The State of American Democracy
In the last session of the summer, Rory will be joined by Adam Przeworski, Susan Stokes, Steven Levitsky, and Daniel Ziblatt, some of the field's leading scholars of democracy, authoritarianism and democratic backsliding. They will discuss patterns in democratic collapse throughout the world and take stock of the state of American democracy under Donald Trump. The conversation will also focus on how American democracy can be rejuvenated and rebuilt.
Meet the Speakers
Adam Przeworski is the Carroll and Milton Professor Emeritus of Politics and (by courtesy) Economics at New York University. Previously he taught at the University of Chicago and held visiting appointments in India, Chile, France, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1991, he is the recipient of the 1985 Socialist Review Book Award, the 1998 Gregory M. Luebbert Article Award, the 2001 Woodrow Wilson Prize, the 2010 Lawrence Longley Article Award, the 2018 Sakip Sabanci International Award, and the 2018 Juan Linz Prize. In 2010, he received the Johan Skytte Prize. He recently published Why Bother with Elections? (Polity Press 2018) and Crises of Democracy (Cambridge University Press 2019). Adam Przeworski has studied political regimes, democracy, autocracy, and their intermediate forms, the conditions under which regimes survive and change, as well as their consequences for economic development and income equality. His focus is on the role of elections as a mechanism of managing societal conflicts. His current projects concern the phenomenon of "democratic backsliding," the historical evolution of constitutional rules for electing chief executives, and the policies adopted by different regimes in response to the Covid19 pandemic.
Susan Stokes is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and Director of the Chicago Center on Democracy. She has written or coauthored six books on topics including democratic theory, distributive politics and clientelism, political behavior and participation, democratic erosion, and Latin American politics. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts Sciences, past chair of APSA’s Comparative Politics and Democracy and Autocracy Sections, past chair of the Yale Political Science Department, and a founding member of Bright Line Watch. Her latest book, forthcoming in 2025, is entitled The Backsliders: Why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracies. It offers an explanation for the wave of democratic erosion or backsliding that has affected many countries in the early 21st century, including the United States, several European countries, and others in the Global South.
Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He is Senior Fellow at the Kettering Foundation and a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions, with a focus on Latin America. He is co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times Best-Seller and was published in 30 languages, and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. He has written or edited 11 other books, including Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2003), Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (with Lucan Way) (Princeton University Press, 2022).
Daniel Ziblatt is the Eaton Professor of Government at Harvard University and director of Harvard University's Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. He also leads a research group on democracy and democratic erosion at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center in Germany. Ziblatt teaches and researches on democracy, the political history of Europe, and is the author of several influential books on democracy and state-building, including two New York Times best sellers, How Democracies Die (2018) and Tyranny of the Minority (2023), co-authored with Steven Levitsky. The former, translated into over thirty languages, winner of the 2019 Goldsmith Prize and shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize, has been described by The Economist magazine as "...the most important book of the Trump era." Ziblatt's earlier work includes Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (2017), an account of the historical development of democracy in 19th- and 20th-century Europe, awarded the Woodrow Wilson Prize by the American Political Science Association and the Barrington Moore Prize by the American Sociological Association. His writing appears regularly in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Die Zeit, and other publications. Ziblatt is a Fellow of the the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 2023) and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (elected 2025)