A bestseller by these two authors argues that until 2016, democratic backsliding in the United States was limited by the virtues of “mutual toleration” and “institutional forbearance.” For 10 points each:
[10m] Name these two Harvard political scientists, who warned against tactics like “constitutional hardball” in their 2018 book How Democracies Die.
ANSWER: Steven Levitsky AND Daniel Ziblatt
[10h] How Democracies Die was inspired by Levitsky’s prior work defining this type of hybrid regime, exemplified by Fujimori’s Peru, where the government violates basic democratic criteria but faces “arenas of contestation” with the opposition.
ANSWER: competitive authoritarianism
[10e] The anti-democratic concerns of the founding fathers are attacked in a more recent Levitsky and Ziblatt book whose title inverts this situation. In On Liberty, J.S. Mill worried about this four-word situation where the many can oppress the few.
ANSWER: tyranny of the majority (Levitsky and Ziblatt’s book is Tyranny of the Minority.)
<CS, Social Science>