Rate My Professor Steven Levitsky

Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he also serves as Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. He is a 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 primary emphasis on Latin America. Levitsky has held his current positions at Harvard since joining the faculty in 2000, advancing from assistant professor to associate professor and then full professor of government.

He is the co-author, with Daniel Ziblatt, of the New York Times best-selling book How Democracies Die, published in 2018 and translated into 30 languages, and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. Levitsky has written or edited 11 additional 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). He and Lucan Way are currently working on a book examining democratic resilience worldwide. Levitsky has contributed articles to outlets including the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and The New Republic, and has served as a columnist for La República in Peru and Folha de São Paulo in Brazil. His subfields include comparative politics, with academic interests in democracy, institutions, parties, campaigns, and elections, and research methods encompassing historical and qualitative approaches focused on Latin America.