PERSON: Steven Levitsky

Professor

Steven Robert Levitsky (born January 17, 1968) is an American political scientist and professor of government at Harvard University and a senior fellow for democracy at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also a senior fellow at the Kettering Foundation, an American non-partisan research foundation.

A comparative political scientist, his research interests focus on Latin America and include political parties and party systems, authoritarianism and democratization, and weak and informal institutions.

He is notable for his work on competitive authoritarian regimes and informal political institutions. An expert on Latin America, Levitsky co-authored the 2018 best seller How Democracies Die with Daniel Ziblatt (an expert on authoritarianism in interwar Europe), warning that Donald Trump and the Republican Party were engaging in rhetoric and actions that have parallels with the breakdown of democracy in other regions and historical periods.

Levitsky was raised in Ithaca, New York. His father was a professor of psychology at Cornell University.

He studied Spanish in high school and became aware of the Reagan Administration policies toward Central America. As an undergraduate, he took some courses about Latin America and “fell in love with the region”. In the summer of 1989, he visited Managua, Nicaragua, to do research for his senior thesis.

Levitsky received a B.A. in political science from Stanford University in 1990 and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1999.

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