How Democracies Die

by Steven Levitsky

  African Americans suddenly constituted a majority: Key Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation, p. 537; Richard Vallely, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 122.

  Federal troops oversaw: Mickey, Paths out of Dixie, p. 38.

  In many southern states: Vallely, The Two Reconstructions, pp. 24, 33; Mickey, Paths out of Dixie, p. 38.

  estimated black turnout was 65 percent: J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 15, 28–29.

  more than 40 percent: Mickey, Paths out of Dixie, pp. 38, 73; Vallely, The Two Reconstructions, pp. 3, 78–79.

  to the once-dominant Democrats: Vallely, The Two Reconstructions, p. 77; and Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, p. 31.

  The Democrats lost power: Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, pp. 26–27, 41.

  “status of black belt whites”: Key Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation, p. 8.

  “the Negro shall never be heard from”: Quoted in Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, p. 209. Toombs once said he was willing to “face thirty years of war to get rid of negro suffrage in the South.” Quoted in Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), pp. 590–91.

  to disenfranchise African Americans: Key Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation, pp. 535–39; Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics; Vallely, The Two Reconstructions, pp. 121–48. Two non-Confederate states, Delaware and Oklahoma, also disenfranchised African Americans (Vallely, The Two Reconstructions, pp. 122–23).

  To comply with the letter of the law: Mickey, Paths out of Dixie, pp. 42–43; Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics.

  “The overarching aim”: Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 89.

  “good square, honest law”: Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, p. 190.

  “Eight Box Law”: Mickey, Paths out of Dixie, pp. 72–73.

  In 1888, Governor John Richardson declared: Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, p. 145.

  fell to just 11 percent: Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, p. 92.

  “wrecked the Republican Party”: Mickey, Paths out of Dixie, p. 73. Republicans did not win the South Carolina governorship until 1974.

  “a sweeping Republican victory”: Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, pp. 103, 113. This paragraph draws on Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, pp. 104–121.

  “to escape their difficulties”: Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, pp. 131–32.

  “Let me sign that bill quickly”: Eight years later, a constitutional convention added a poll tax, literacy test, and property requirements. See Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, p. 137.

  “would be almost all white”: Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, p. 224.

  Black turnout in the South: Stephen Tuck, “The Reversal of Black Voting Rights After Reconstruction,” in Democratization in America: A Comparative-Historical Analysis, eds. Desmond King, Robert C. Lieberman, Gretchen Ritter, and Laurence Whitehead (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), p. 140.

  “The whole South”: Foner, Reconstruction, p. 582.

  an emergency to extend his rule: William C. Rempel, Delusions of a Dictator: The Mind of Marcos as Revealed in His Secret Diaries (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993), pp. 32, 101–3.

  a danger like insurrection: A full video of Marcos’s speech, September 23, 1972, ABS-CVN News, https://www.youtube.com/​watch?v=bDCHIIXEXes.

  “rally ’round the flag”: See John Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion (New York: Wiley, 1973). More recent empirical studies of the rally-’round-the-flag effect in the United States include John R. Oneal and Anna Lillian Bryan, “The Rally ’Round the Flag Effect in U.S. Foreign Policy Crises, 1950–1985,” Political Behavior 17, no. 4 (1995), pp. 379–401; Matthew A. Baum, “The Constituent Foundations of the Rally-’Round-the-Flag Phenomenon,” International Studies Quarterly 46 (2002), pp. 263–98; and J. Tyson Chatagnier, “The Effect of Trust in Government on Rallies ’Round the Flag,” Journal of Peace Research 49, no. 5 (2012), pp. 631–45.

  the highest figure ever recorded by Gallup: David W. Moore, “Bush Approval Rating Highest in Gallup History,” Gallup News Service, September 21, 2001. See http://www.gallup.com/​poll/​4924/​bush-job-approval-highest-gallup-history.aspx.

  fear for their own safety: Leonie Huddy, Nadia Khatib, and Theresa Capelos, “The Polls—Trends, Reactions to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001,” Public Opinion Quarterly 66 (2002), pp. 418–50; Darren W. Davis and Brian D. Silver, “Civil Liberties vs. Security: Public Opinion in the Context of the Terrorist Attacks on America,” American Journal of Political Science 48, no. 1 (2004), pp. 28–46; Leonie Huddy, Stanley Feldman, and Christopher Weber, “The Political Consequences of Perceived Threat and Felt Insecurity,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 614 (2007), pp. 131–53; and Adam J. Berinsky, In Time of War: Understanding American Public Opinion from World War II to Iraq (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), Chapter 7.

  In the aftermath of 9/11: Moore, “Bush Approval Rating Highest in Gallup History.”

  necessary to give up some civil liberties: Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Online. Accessed at http://www.albany.edu/​sourcebook/​ind/​TERRORISM.Public_opinion.Civil_liberties.2.html.

  After Pearl Harbor: “Gallup Vault: World War II–Era Support for Japanese Internment,” August 31, 2016, http://www.gallup.com/​vault/​195257/​gallup-vault-wwii-era-support-japanese-internment.aspx.

  Most constitutions permit: On “states of exception” in Latin American constitutions, see Brian Loveman, The Constitution of Tyranny: Regimes of Exception in Spanish America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994). On the U.S. Constitution, see Huq and Ginsburg, “How to Lose a Constitutional Democracy,” pp. 29–31.

  after the coup: Julio F. Carrion, “Public Opinion, Market Reforms, and Democracy in Fujimori’s Peru,” in The Fujimori Legacy: The Rise of Electoral Authoritarianism in Peru, ed. Julio F. Carrion (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), p. 129.

  “communist menace”: Sterling Seagrave, The Marcos Dynasty (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), pp. 243–44; Rempel, Delusions of a Dictator, pp. 52–55. In February 1970, Marcos wrote in his diary, “It has saddened me to be driven to the refuge of anti-communism” (Rempel, Delusions of a Dictator, p. 53).

  a few dozen actual insurgents: Rempel, Delusions of a Dictator, pp. 61, 122, 172–73.

  fomented public hysteria: Seagrave, The Marcos Dynasty, p. 244.

  Marcos wanted to declare martial law: Rempel, Delusions of a Dictator, pp. 105–7.

  the work of government forces: “Philippines: Marcos Gambles on Martial Law,” United States Department of State Declassified Intelligence Note, Bureau of Intelligence Research, Dated October 6, 1972. Also Seagrave, The Marcos Dynasty, p. 242.

  “nowhere near the scene”: Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989), p. 359. Also Seagrave, The Marcos Dynasty, p. 262.

  The question of whether a young Dutchman: See account of the historiography by Richard Evans, “The Conspiracists,” London Review of Books 36, no. 9 (2014), pp. 3–9.

  government’s own intelligence service: See John B. Dunlop, The Moscow Bombings: Examinations of Russian Terrorist Attacks at the Onset of Vladimir Putin’s Rule (London: Ibidem, 2014). Also Baker and Glasser, Kremlin Rising, p. 55.

  a major boost with the bombings: Baker and Glasser, Kremlin Rising, p. 55.

  The Russian public rallied: Richard Sakwa, Putin: Russia’s Choice, Second Edition (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 20–22; Masha Gessen, Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Puti
n (London: Penguin, 2012), pp. 23–42; Dunlop, The Moscow Bombings.

  a series of ISIS terrorist attacks: Cagaptay, The New Sultan, pp. 181–82.

  even two members of the Constitutional Court: “Turkey: Events of 2016,” Human Rights Watch World Report 2017, https://www.hrw.org/​world-report/​2017/​country-chapters/​turkey. Also “Turkey Coup Attempt: Crackdown Toll Passes 50,000,” BBC.com, July 20, 2016.

  The power grab culminated: The reform gave the president the authority to dissolve parliament and unilaterally appoint four-fifths of the Constitutional Court. See the evaluation of the constitutional amendment by the Turkish Bar Association, available at http://anayasadegisikligi.barobirlik.org.tr/​Anayasa_Degisikligi.aspx.

  CHAPTER 5: THE GUARDRAILS OF DEMOCRACY

  a beacon of hope and possibility: Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 36.

  the Constitution was the major reason: For sources, see Guillermo O’Donnell and Laurence Whitehead, “Two Comparative Democratization Perspectives: ‘Brown Areas’ and ‘Immanence,’ ” in Democratization in America: A Comparative-Historical Perspective, eds. Desmond King, Robert C. Lieberman, Gretchen Ritter, and Laurence Whitehead, p. 48.

  Adolf Hitler’s usurpation of power: Kenneth F. Ledford, “German Lawyers and the State in the Weimar Republic,” Law and History Review 13, no. 2 (1995), pp. 317–49.

  near-replicas of the U.S. Constitution: George Athan Billias, American Constitutionalism Heard Round the World, 1776–1989 (New York: New York University Press, 2009), pp. 124–25; Zackary Elkins, Tom Ginsburg, and James Melton, The Endurance of National Constitutions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 26.

  Argentina’s 1853 constitution: Jonathan M. Miller, “The Authority of a Foreign Talisman: A Study of U.S. Constitutional Practice as Authority in Nineteenth Century Argentina and the Argentine Elite’s Leap of Faith,” The American University Law Review 46, no. 5 (1997), pp. 1464–572. Also Billias, American Constitutionalism Heard Round the World, pp. 132–35.

  Two-thirds of its text: Miller, “The Authority of a Foreign Talisman,” pp. 1510–11.

  “provided a textbook example”: Raul C. Pangalangan, “Anointing Power with Piety: People Power, Democracy, and the Rule of Law,” in Law and Newly Restored Democracies: The Philippines Experience in Restoring Political Participation and Accountability, ed. Raul C. Pangalangan (Tokyo: Institute of Developing Economies, 2002), p. 3.

  “God has never endowed”: Benjamin Harrison, This Country of Ours (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897), p. ix.

  and even contradictory, ways: Huq and Ginsburg, “How to Lose a Constitutional Democracy,” p. 72; also William G. Howell, Power Without Persuasion: The Politics of Direct Presidential Action (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 13–16.

  few constitutional safeguards against filling: Huq and Ginsburg, “How to Lose a Constitutional Democracy,” pp. 61–63; also Bruce Ackerman, The Decline and Fall of the American Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 183.

  “thin tissue of convention”: Huq and Ginsburg, “How to Lose a Constitutional Democracy,” p. 70.

  does not define the limits of executive power: Huq and Ginsburg, “How to Lose a Constitutional Democracy,” pp. 29, 31. Also Howell, Power Without Persuasion, pp. 13–14, 183–87; and Ackerman, The Decline and Fall of the American Republic, pp. 67–85.

  “a truly antidemocratic leader”: Huq and Ginsburg, “How to Lose a Constitutional Democracy,” pp. 60, 75. Yale constitutional scholar Bruce Ackerman reaches a similar conclusion. See Ackerman, The Decline and Fall of the American Republic.

  All successful democracies rely on informal rules: See Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky, eds., Informal Institutions and Democracy: Lessons from Latin America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

  unwritten rules: Princeton constitutional scholar Keith Whittington calls these “conventions.” See Keith E. Whittington, “The Status of Unwritten Constitutional Conventions in the United States,” University of Illinois Law Review 5 (2013), pp. 1847–70.

  reinforced by their own unwritten rules: See Scott Mainwaring and Aníbal Pérez-Liñan, Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival, and Fall (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

  Unwritten rules are everywhere: For a classic account of the norms or “folkways” of the U.S. Senate, see Donald R. Matthews, U.S. Senators and Their World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960).

  As commonsensical as this idea may sound: Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), p. 8.

  the Federalists regarded them as traitors: Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), p. 122; Gordon S. Wood, The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), p. 114; Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System, pp. 105, 111.

  plotting a British-backed monarchic restoration: Wood, The Idea of America, pp. 244–45; Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System, p. 94.

  Each side hoped to vanquish: Wood, The Idea of America, p. 245.

  rather than destroying each other: Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System.

  The new left-leaning Republican government: Gabriel Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 1931–1939 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 52.

  “bolshevizing foreign agents”: Shlomo Ben-Ami, “The Republican ‘Take-Over’: Prelude to Inevitable Catastrophe,” in Revolution and War in Spain, 1931–1939, ed. Paul Preston (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 58–60.

  “We have now entered the vortex”: Gerard Alexander, The Sources of Democratic Consolidation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 111.

  as monarchist or fascist counterrevolutionaries: Raymond Carr, Spain 1808–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 621.

  willing to play the democratic game: Michael Mann, Fascists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 330.

  fundamentally “disloyal”: Juan J. Linz, “From Great Hopes to Civil War: The Breakdown of Democracy in Spain,” in The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Europe, eds. Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 162.

  a profound threat: Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, pp. 147–48.

  “break all solidarity with the present institutions”: Quoted in Linz, “From Great Hopes to Civil War,” p. 161.

  brutally repressed the uprising: As many as 2,000 workers were killed in the repression, and an estimated 20,000 leftists were imprisoned. See Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (London: Penguin Books, 2001), p. 136; Stanley Payne, The Franco Regime 1936–1974 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 43.

  associate the entire Republican opposition: Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, pp. 165–68.

  institutional forbearance: We borrow the term forbearance from Alisha Holland. See Alisha Holland, “Forbearance,” American Political Science Review 110, no. 2 (May 2016), pp. 232–46; and Holland, Forbearance as Redistribution: The Politics of Informal Welfare in Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Also see Eric Nelson, “Are We on the Verge of the Death Spiral That Produced the English Revolution of 1642–1649?,” History News Network, December 14, 2014, http://historynewsnetwork.org/​article/​157822.

  “patient self-control”: Oxford Dictionary, See https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/​definition/​forbearance.

  to the hilt: Whittington, “The Status of Unwritten Constitutional Conventions in the United States,” p. 106.

  divine-right rule: Reinhard Bendix, Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 7.

  To be “godly”: Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People: The Ri
se of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), p. 21; Bendix, Kings or People, p. 234.

  “future ages groan for this foul act”: Anthony Dawson and Paul Yachnin, eds., Richard II, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 241.

  “a matter of royal prerogative”: Whittington, “The Status of Unwritten Constitutional Conventions in the United States,” p. 107.

  not a law but a norm: Julia R. Azari and Jennifer K. Smith, “Unwritten Rules: Informal Institutions in Established Democracies,” Perspectives on Politics 10, no. 1 (March 2012); also Whittington, “The Status of Unwritten Constitutional Conventions in the United States,” pp. 109–12.

  “I should unwillingly be”: Thomas Jefferson, Letter to the Vermont State Legislature, December 10, 1807, quoted in Thomas H. Neale, Presidential Terms and Tenure: Perspectives and Proposals for Change (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2004), p. 5.

  “departure from this time-honored custom”: Bruce Peabody, “George Washington, Presidential Term Limits, and the Problem of Reluctant Political Leadership,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 31, no. 3, p. 402.

  violate an “unwritten law”: Whittington, “The Status of Unwritten Constitutional Conventions in the United States,” p. 110. When Theodore Roosevelt sought a nonconsecutive third term in 1912, he failed to win the Republican nomination, and when he ran as an independent, he was shot on the campaign trail by a man who claimed to be defending the two-term limit. See Elkins, Ginsburg, and Melton, The Endurance of National Constitutions, p. 47.

  FDR’s reelection in 1940: Azari and Smith, “Unwritten Rules: Informal Institutions in Established Democracies,” p. 44.

  especially important in presidential democracies: See Nelson, “Are We on the Verge of the Death Spiral That Produced the English Revolution of 1642–1649?”

  can easily bring deadlock: Juan J. Linz, “The Perils of Presidentialism,” Journal of Democracy 1, no. 1 (January 1990), pp. 51–69; also see Gretchen Helmke, Institutions on the Edge: The Origins and Consequences of Inter-Branch Crises in Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).