Steven Levitsky is the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Government at Harvard and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. His research focuses on democratization, authoritarianism, political parties, and informal institutions, particularly in Latin America. He is co-author of How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority, both widely acclaimed works. Levitsky has also contributed to prominent publications like The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Foreign Affairs.
The year 2024 has been frequently described as a “Year of Elections,” with over 50 countries holding elections and more than two billion voters heading to the polls worldwide. What global trends have caught your attention this year? Beyond the United States, which elections have you watched closely and why?
I paid [the] closest attention to the United States, which I think has a far greater impact than any other election. [I also watched] India in 2024—also a very big democracy. In Venezuela, [there] was an important challenge to an authoritarian regime and one of the most open and egregious frauds in the history of the modern West. Certainly, there has not been a fraud of that scope in Latin America in a century. Those are three elections that went in very different directions.
The most important pattern that I saw was anti-incumbent voting just about everywhere in the democratic world and in much of the non-democratic world. The level of citizen distrust [and] discontent with their governments, their politicians, [and] their political parties is sky high. This is expressed in both democracies and, in some cases, non-democracies at the polls. [The anti-incumbency trend] account[s] for all of the democratic elections in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, North America, Australia, and New Zealand—basically everywhere except for Asia and Africa. Since COVID[-19] hit in early 2020, [in] 41 out of 55 national elections, incumbents were thrown out of power. Nearly 80 percent of the time incumbents are losing elections, like never before in history. That was really the dominant pattern in democracies across the world.
In some cases, that has been problematic for democracy, when incumbents are defeated by authoritarian-leaning populist oppositions, like in the United States. That's problematic for democracy. In other cases—like in India, where the [Bharatiya Janata Party or] BJP was weakened considerably, like in Poland [in] 2023 where the Law [and] Justice Party was defeated, [and like] in Botswana, where the ruling party was defeated for the first time ever—this anti-incumbent voting works in favor of democracy. This [trend] isn't necessarily good or bad for democracy. What it is, is systematically bad for incumbents. Now, we don't have a great explanation for why this is happening. It's almost certainly a product [of] and [a] part of COVID[-19] [and] inflation, which is one of the legacies of COVID[-19], probably exacerbated by social media. But one thing we know for sure is voters are very anti-incumbent.
With this incumbency advantage shift—given it's across so many countries, like Botswana and North Macedonia—are there regional differences in how it's shown up, or is it just this broad trend?
At the moment, it's pretty broad. We don't have enough data to say with any certainty, but anti-incumbent turns seem a little weaker in East Asia. Although, we're seeing it in South Korea [with the failure of the president’s coup]. We saw [it] a little bit in Japan [with the loss of the Liberal Democratic Party’s long-standing parliamentary majority]. In Taiwan, incumbents were re-elected. It's a little bit more mixed in East Asia, and these are countries and places where incumbents handled COVID[-19] relatively well. There aren't enough cases to say for sure [why this trend appears differently]. It's a pretty widespread effect in that we're seeing [it across] Latin America, Europe, [and] North America.
Many of these elections—including those in Russia, Pakistan, and Mexico—are taking place in hybrid or authoritarian regimes. How should we interpret these elections when so few occur in fully democratic or even flawed democratic systems?
Again, the anti-incumbent voting is broadly double-edged for democracy. It's challenging for democracy in that voters are so fed up with the status quo in many countries that they're turning to anti-system outsiders, some of whom are not fully committed to democratic rules for the game. This is El Salvador and Tunisia, maybe Argentina, maybe [the] United States. That's a threat.
The good thing is that incumbent, authoritarian incumbents are having a hell of a time, and they're often getting thrown out of power. Even in a hybrid regime, even in a soft authoritarian regime, most regimes continue to hold elections of some kind. They're not fair elections. The media [and] the playing field [at-large are] very often tilted heavily in favor of incumbents. This was [the] case in Poland; it was big time [the case] in Venezuela; it was [the] case in Türkiye, where Erdoğan was sweating for a while. Even when you control most of the levers of power, even when the playing field is tilted, if you're not outright stealing votes, there's no guarantee. Elections have proven really difficult, even for authoritarian-leaning incumbents, whether it be Senegal or Poland or India.
In Venezuela, the incumbent government lost the election overwhelmingly, [and the election results] forced [the existing regime] to nakedly steal the election, which it [has] managed to get away with so far. [However,] it's a huge blow to the legitimacy of the regime. Every single Venezuelan knows that the opposition won that election by 30 points. Every government official, every police officer, every soldier, every minister in that government—every time they walk [in] the street and look in the eyes of everyday Venezuelans—they know that those Venezuelans know that they stole the election. What that would mean [is] still unclear. Having to steal the election in that manner clearly weakened the regime.
Beyond Venezuela, do you see similar patterns of rule of law lessening the authority of the regime—or the respect for the regime—elsewhere in Latin America?
Latin American states over the last 30 or 40 years have had a pretty uneven rule of law. There are some places where the rule of law has clearly worsened in recent years: Venezuela, Nicaragua, [and] probably El Salvador. There are other cases where I think the rule of law has strengthened somewhat in recent years. [In] Colombia, the rule of law has strengthened. It's kind of a mixed bag in Latin America. These are places historically where the rule of law has not been as consistently upheld as in [regions like] Western Europe. It's still uneven, but I don't see a clear downward trend in terms of the rule of law. In fact, there is a really interesting case [in] Brazil, where the Supreme Court has gained so much power in upholding or defending the rule of law that there's a lot of concern that this unelected body, the Supreme Court, now wields too much power [and] that the forces of the law are too powerful in Brazil.
Across these elections, there has been a trend towards populism and anti-democratic leadership. What makes the trend away from democracy in the United States unique, if anything?
There's definitely a pattern of the election of political outsiders with a populist bent. By “populist,” I simply mean leaders who mobilize voters by railing against the entire political elite with an anti-system, anti-establishment appeal. Populists of the right, left, and center are getting elected with greater frequency, actually, in Western democracies than in Latin America. It's a mixed bag in terms of how dangerous they are for democracy. They do very often tend to bring democratic crisis, if not democratic backsliding. Peru in the 1990s, Venezuela under Chávez, El Salvador under Bukele, [and] to some extent [the] United States under Trump [are all examples]. I think we're gonna see more.
There are other cases where populists end up either failing, like Castillo [in] Peru, or end up not doing all that much damage to democracy. Bolsonaro [in some ways] ultimately fail[ed] in Argentina. It's not true that all populists get away with democratic backsliding, but they do bring a higher risk of democratic crisis. That one pattern, very similar to the United States, is that more anti-system figures are getting elected, and that is not necessarily killing, but destabilizing democracies. In many countries, we're seeing a little less populism in Asia and Africa. It’s not a global thing. It's primarily in Latin America, East Europe, and North America. The far right in Europe—not everyone calls it “populist”—[is] basically the rise of ethno-nationalist, anti-immigration parties.
In countries experiencing a shift away from democracy—often associated with populism or the rise of the far right—what do you see as the most urgent priorities for renewing democratic governance? Additionally, what differences do you observe between societies where populists rise to power but do not significantly undermine democratic systems and those where such leadership has a more damaging effect?
It seems pretty clear to me that there are a couple of key variables. Populists do the most damage to democracy where democratic institutions are weak to begin with. Countries like Ecuador, El Salvador, [and] Peru are going to be much more vulnerable to democratic backsliding than Argentina, South Korea, the United States, or Brazil. Most democracies with relatively strong institutions have been able to muddle through populist presidencies. Brazil, Argentina, [and the] United States are in that category. The Trump [presidency] 2.0 is going to be a lot worse than 1.0. Again, democracies with pretty weak institutions are more likely to suffer more significant backsliding.
What to do about it is the question of our time. Political scientists have mostly failed at this [answer]. We have failed to fully understand the depth of the public discontent that's giving rise to populism. We've been at least partly taken by surprise by the success of populism, or populist candidates, and the extreme difficulty [of curbing populism]. Even [though] non-populist parties have won power in the last five years, they're failing politically very quickly. Biden [in the United States] is a case of a non-populist government that, policy-wise, seems to perform relatively well and really flounder[s] politically. The Starmer government [in the United Kingdom] won big in the election. Starmer has been in power for a few months, and he's already down to a 26 percent approval rating. [The] Labour [Party], despite a landslide victory, is behind in the polls. The Labour government lasted six months before flaming out politically. The Social Democratic government in Germany [is] very similar. [It] lasted about a year before it began to really lose steam politically; it's now about to collapse, and it's probably going to be beaten badly in the election to come. Right now, it seems like mainstream, non-populist governments—particularly center-left governments—are just not figuring out how to go. I don't think we fully understand the depth and the source of the public discontent, and until we do, politicians are not gonna be able to address it.
[The] sort of good news of this anti-incumbent wave is that [only] some populists have managed to figure out how to maintain public support. Bukele [in El Salvador] and [Andrés Manuel López Obrador or] AMLO [in Mexico] are two examples, and maybe Milei in Argentina. Those early populists very often don't prove to be all that successful [or] popular.
Populists do less damage in countries with strong democratic institutions like Argentina. The other big difference is how popular populists are. A populist [can] get 80 percent public support—like in El Salvador, Peru, Korea, or Ecuador—Erdoğan in Türkiye never had 80 percent but had a lot of support. Those guys do a lot more damage than populists who have 40 percent support, like Bolsonaro and Trump. The good news [is that] a lot of populist governments proved to be not particularly popular and can get defeated.
We're going to have to learn how to undo the effects of populist backsliding. The two countries to look at are Brazil and Poland, which in the last two or three years have had these explicitly anti-populist and post-populist governments dealing with some of the institutional manipulation, politicization, weaponization, and corruption of political institutions; hopefully, those countries will teach us something about how to dig out from populism in a way that avoids its return. The United States was an unsuccessful case of that. The United States defeated the populists after one election, after one term in office, but the subsequent government completely failed to get the country on a new track. We've had very few of these post-populist cases. We don't know very much about what to do and what not to do, but those are countries to be looking at.
Black spoke with Levitsky on December 16, 2024. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
The views expressed in this piece are the interviewee's own and are not reflective of the views of the HIR.
