300150 How Democracies Die: On the institutional conditions of liberal democracies (S) (WiSe 2024/2025)

In this course we discuss the book “How Democracies Die” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt as well as a number of additional readings that deal with the institutional conditions of democracy as a modern system of government. When it comes to the study of democracies, the social science literature tends to focus on a limited set of questions: What are the distinct characteristics of democracies and how do different electoral systems and other institutional elements of democracies work (“comparative study of democracies”)? On which normative reasoning can we draw to explain and legitimize democracy as a system of government (“theories of democracy”)? By contrast, the course focuses on empirical conditions of the existence and survival of modern democracies. We ask: How do once taken-for-granted democracies come into question, how are democracies eroded and possibly upended by anti-democratic and autocratic forces? Levitsky’s and Ziblatt’s book “How Democracies Die”, first published in 2018, is an agenda-setting contribution to this line of questioning. In the first part of the seminar, we read this book from beginning to end to identify major questions, historical issues and guiding hypothesis. We also use the discussion of the book to collect and single out further readings that might be useful to deepen our understanding of the problem and discuss possible political implications. These readings are discussed in the second part of the course, with students welcome to influence the selection of readings with their own interests and ideas.

Bibliography

Levitsky, Steven/Daniel Ziblatt: How Democracies Die, New York: Penguin, 2018