There is no shortage of blogs, books, and articles warning readers about the erosion of democracy in the United States and Europe. While How Democracies Die joins this chorus of Cassandras, it nonetheless breaks new empirical and theoretical ground. It is a must-read—for four reasons.

First, this book reminds us that when all is said and done, political leaders and not such “usual suspects” as socioeconomic decline, malfunctioning democratic institutions, and angry publics bring down democracy. This generalization seems as apt today as it was 15 years ago, when Nancy Bermeo fingered political leaders as the culprit in democracy’s demise in interwar Europe and post–World War II Latin America.^{Footnote 1} How Democracies Die, however, takes this insight about political leaders one step further. As the examples drawn from interwar Belgium and Finland as well as 2016 Austria suggest, democratic leaders—in particular, leaders of mainstream parties—have also played a decisive role in defending democracy from extremist leaders. A key issue for Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, therefore, is whether political leaders decide to challenge or enable wannabe autocrats. What matters more to these leaders—their worries about democracy’s future or their hunger for power and policy? This is a question that many Americans keep asking themselves since January 20, 2017, as they watch the behavior of Republican members of Congress.

Second, Levitsky and Ziblatt organize their book around an important but all too rarely posed question: If political leaders that threaten democracy are always a possibility (as the U.S. Founding Fathers recognized), then what can democracies do to stop them? They offer two answers. One is to take preemptive action; that is, prevent such leaders from winning power. While public preferences are an important part of this equation, even more critical for Levitsky and Ziblatt is how mainstream politicians and parties react to this threat. Do they offer credible and effective alternatives to extremists? If extremists manage to attract significant popular support, do mainstream players bicker among themselves or find ways to work together to marginalize dangerous politicians and parties? The second answer comes into play if extremist politicians are elected. Are mainstream leaders and formal and informal institutions up to the task of defending the democratic rules of the game? How effective are democracy’s guardrails when democratically elected leaders are not democrats?

Third, Levitsky and Ziblatt take a rigorous approach to assessing how and how well democracies deal with authoritarian threats. In particular, they draw upon the contemporary and historical experiences of a wide range of democracies around the world to generate an insightful and user-friendly checklist of threats to the quality and survival of democracy (see pages 23–24, 1–67, and 188). It is chilling that the Trump administration, especially through its words (which the authors rightly see as an important first step in the story of democratic backsliding), has already succeeded in checking off all the boxes, not even halfway through its term. What makes this exercise so compelling is how the authors constructed their checklist. They give equal attention to democracy’s trials in the past and the present; key episodes in American, Latin American, and European history; and challenges to the quality and survival of democracy that succeeded and failed.

A final contribution of this book is that it fleshes out the details of democratic decline. For instance, the authors argue that extremist outsiders threaten democracy not just because of their policy priorities, but also because their background leaves them with little patience for either the “grinding work” of democracy (p. 77) or the unexpected and binding constraints on what they can do, once they win the election and take office. Another example is the importance of forbearance as an informal norm in democratic politics. This is the idea that the cause of democracy is best served when politicians underplay, rather than overplay, their power. Finally, the authors are quite right in my view to see most leadership assaults on democracy as the product of many steps, largely unplanned, taken by key players interacting with one another rather than a plot, hatched and orchestrated, by a dedicated autocrat.

While the many contributions of this book recognized, there are two questions that I would pose to the authors. First, like most studies of the crisis of democracy in the West, this book pays scant attention to international influences on both the decline and the return of democracy. Can this be right? What about the role of powerful international actors in subverting democracy—for example, not just Russia in the 2016 U.S. election (and the Brexit vote in Great Britain) but also the United States in the case of Chile in 1973? Similarly, what about the role of powerful international actors in helping secure and restore democracy—as with, for instance, the European Union in the case of its eastern expansion after the fall of communism; the United States in the case of the “No” campaign in Chile in 1988; or, more recently, U.S. and European support for the electoral defeat of authoritarian rulers in postcommunist Europe and Eurasia (the color revolutions)? But international influences also include international diffusion. It is striking that episodes of both transitions to democracy and democratic breakdowns tend to cluster over time and across country—whether we look at the interwar period, the 1970s to the 1990s, or the last decade. If international diffusion is in play, then these episodes are not independent of one another, and comparing them becomes problematic.

The other question regards the authors’ decision to place political leaders and political parties at the center of their story, whether they are interested in explaining why extremist politicians win power or, having accomplished that, why those politicians succeed in compromising and dismantling democracy. I see a much more important role for mass publics in both dramas. First, as Julia Azari has convincingly argued, a key threat to U.S. democracy today is the odd combination of weak parties and strong partisanship.^{Footnote 2} It is this combination that highlights the interactions among politicians, parties, and citizens that elected Trump and that have helped him destabilize U.S. democracy. Second, as Aleksandar Matovski has argued, authoritarian turns in democratic politics, as we have seen over the course of Vladimir Putin’s reign in Russia, have a demand as well as a supply side.^{Footnote 3} The trauma of political disorder and threats to national security can lead citizens to seek and support authoritarian rulers.

Finally, does it make sense to look to mainstream politicians and parties to save imperiled democracies when it was the failures of those politicians and parties that laid the groundwork for the empowerment of an authoritarian ruler in the first place? Perhaps it makes more sense to focus on an obvious strategy—that is, defeating authoritarian rulers at the polls—and ask why that happens. As we know from such cases as the Philippines in 1986, the “No” campaign in Chile in 1988, the Nicaraguan election in 1990, and the color revolutions in postcommunist Europe and Eurasia from 1998 to 2005, it was people, not party power, that won the day. More precisely, it was the adoption of sophisticated campaign strategies and unprecedented collaboration among opposition leaders and parties, civil society groups, and ordinary citizens willing to vote and, if necessary, take to the streets that played the key role in returning these countries to the democratic path.^{Footnote 4}