Speaker: Professor Steven Levitsky (Department of Government and David Rockefeller Chair of Latin American Studies, Harvard University)

Dr. Levitsky’s writings on political parties, informal institutions, and competitive authoritarianism are agenda setting works in the discipline of political science. His most recent work on partisan polarization, the 2018 New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, with Daniel Ziblatt, has made him a central figure in contemporary debates regarding American democracy. According to The New York Times Book Review this book is “comprehensive, enlightening, and terrifyingly timely.”

Professor Levitsky is also co-author of Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (2010); author of Transforming Labour- Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (2003); and co-editor of The Resurgence of the Left in Latin America (2011), Informal Institutions and Democracy: Lessons from Latin America (2006), and Argentine Democracy: The Politics of Institutional Weakness (2005).