How Democracies Die

Chapter 4 opens with a description of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori’s rise to power the early 1990s. A university administrator with no political experience, Fujimori won amid the threat posed by a violent insurgency led by a group called The Shining Path, by promising to fight against terrorism and enact economic reform, though “he had only a vague idea of how to accomplish these things” (73). When he encountered opposition from congress, the authors note, Fujimori lashed out and resorted to executive decrees. Two years after his election, Fujimori shut down congress, and “the long-shot outsider had become a tyrant” (75).

With this anecdote, Levitsky and Ziblatt illustrate how democratic breakdown can be a gradual process, whereby conflict escalates between an outsider and the political establishment. Words play an important part in this; authoritarians like Chavez and Fujimori used insulting names for their opponents or labeled them terrorists. The media is often similarly branded. This rhetoric, in turn, polarizes society and foments mistrust. Meanwhile, many authoritarians, unused to the slow work of democratic politics, find it frustrating work and seek alternative ways of working, including getting society’s “referees” on the would-be authoritarian’s side.