When Democracy Breaks Studies in Democratic Erosion and Collapse, from Ancient Athens to the Present Day

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Democracy is often described in two opposite ways, as either wonderfully resilient or dangerously fragile. Both characterizations can be correct, depending on the context. When Democracy Breaks aims to deepen our understanding of what separates democratic resilience from democratic fragility by focusing on the latter. The volume's collaborators--experts in the history and politics of the societies covered in their chapters--explore eleven episodes of democratic breakdown, from ancient Athens to Weimar Germany to present-day Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela. Strikingly, in every case, various forms of democratic erosion long preceded the final democratic breakdown. Although no single causal factor emerges as decisive, linking together all of the episodes, some important commonalities--including extreme political polarization, explicitly anti-democratic political actors, and significant political violence--stand out across the cases. Moreover, the notion of democratic culture, while admittedly difficult to define and even more difficult to measure, may play a role in all of them. Throughout the volume, the contributors show again and again that the written rules of democracy are insufficient to protect against tyranny. While each case of democratic decay is unique, the patterns that emerge shed much light on the continuing struggle to sustain modern democracies and to assess and respond to the threats they face.

Archon Fung is the Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. His research explores policies, practices, and institutional designs that deepen the quality of democratic governance. He focuses upon public participation, deliberation, and transparency. He co-directs the Transparency Policy Project and leads democratic governance programs of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Kennedy School. His books include Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency (with Mary Graham and David Weil) and Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy. He has authored five books, four edited collections, and over fifty articles appearing in professional journals.

David Moss is the Paul Whiton Cherington Professor at Harvard Business School, where he teaches in the Business, Government, and the International Economy (BGIE) unit. Prior to joining the Harvard Business School faculty in 1993, he served as a senior economist at Abt Associates. Moss is the author of numerous books, articles, and case studies, mainly on the history of economic policy and democratic governance in the United States. His most notable books include When All Else Fails: Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager and Democracy: A Case Study. A member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Social Insurance, he is the recipient of many honors, including the Student Association Faculty Award for outstanding teaching at Harvard Business School (twelve times) and the American Risk and Insurance Association's Annual Kulp-Wright Book Award for the "most influential text published on the economics of risk management and insurance." Moss is also the founder and president of two nonprofit organizations, the Tobin Project (itself a recipient of the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions) and the Case Method Institute for Education and Democracy.

Odd Arne Westad is Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University. He is a scholar of modern international and global history, with a specialization in the history of eastern Asia since the 18th century. Westad has published 16 books, most of which deal with twentieth century Asian and global history. Westad joined the faculty at Yale after teaching at the London School of Economics (LSE), where he was School Professor of International History, and at Harvard University, where he was the S.T. Lee Professor of US-Asia Relations. At Yale, he teaches in the History Department and at the Jackson School of Global Affairs, is an adviser at Davenport College, and serves as director of International Security Studies. Westad is a fellow of the British Academy and of several other national academies, a visiting professor at Peking University, and a research associate of the Harvard Fairbank Center.