Rokkan Memorial Lecture 2026: The Great Abdication. How America Lost Its Democracy.

Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. 

For many years Levitsky has studied democratisation and authoritarianism, political parties and informal institutions, with a particular focus on Latin America. The last few years Levitsky has also used his comparative perspecties to write about democracy in the USA and its challenges. He is the author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of "How Democracies Die", which has been translated into 30 languages, and "Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point". With Lucan Way, he has authored the books "Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War" and "Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism".

Levitsky is one of the world's most renowned political scientists and he has developed new analytical concepts that are in common use in our field today. Concepts such as "competitive authoritarianism" and "linkage and leverage" which he developed with Lucan Way are used broadly also beyond academia, and his works with David Collier in the 1990s were very influential in the conceptual development of democracy as a scientific term in political science.   

He has also written extensively on regime development and political parties in Latin America, on the Peronist Party in Argentina and on informal institutions in Latin America. Today Levitsky is working on a new book with Lucan Way on democratic resilience globally.  

In this year's Rokkan Memorial Lecture Levitsky will apply comparative perspectives in his analysis of the fall of US democracy over the last few years.

The Department welcomes all to the Rokkan Memorial Lecture 2026!