Welcome to today's discussion, the fifth session of the breakdown, where Steve Levitsky and I talk about the struggle for democracy in the United States, reflect on historical precedents in the US and abroad, and offer evidence-based reflections on the path forward. My name is Erica Chenoweth. I'm the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School, and I'm speaking in my individual capacity as a scholar.
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And before we go any further, let me introduce Steve Levitsky, who is the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies, Professor of Government, and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Kettering Foundation and a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions, particularly in Latin America. He's co-author with Daniel Ziblatt of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times bestseller and was published in 30 languages, and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point.
So, Steve, we have some good timing on today's discussion because last week V-Dem, the Varieties of Democracy project out of the University of Gothenburg, released its annual update on trends in global democracy in 2025, edited by Staffan Lindberg and co-authored with a lot of folks on his team. And so that means they updated tons of indicators in every country in the world to give an updated look at the state of global democracy and the state of democracy in every country in the world.
So, let me point out a couple of key highlights from their report, and then we'll dive in a bit more. So, according to V-Dem, the largest democratic declines between the years 2024 and 2025 came in the United States. In fact, the liberal democracy index that V-Dem measures saw the biggest annual drop in US history from 2024 to 2025 in the country's history back to 1789. So, they're arguing that the backsliding episode that the US has experienced in the liberal democracy index supersedes anything the US has experienced in the lifetime of their data.
They argue that, and I'm going to quote now from their summary of the key takeaways on the US case: "Under Trump's presidency, the level of democracy in the USA has fallen back to the same level as in 1965. Yet the situation is fundamentally different than during the Civil Rights era. In 2025, the derailment of democracy is marked by executive overreach undermining the rule of law, along with far-reaching suppression and intimidation of media and dissenting voices. The speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history. Legislative constraints, the worst affected aspect of democracy, is losing 1/3 of its value in 2025 and reaching its lowest point in over 100 years. Civil rights and equality before the law are also rapidly declining, falling to late 1960s levels. Freedom of expression is now at its lowest level since the end of World War II. Electoral components of democracy remain stable. Election-specific indicators are reassessed only in electoral years, and the 2025 scores are based on the quality of the 2024 elections." End quote.
So, taking a global outlook, they argue that most countries remain stable from 2024, that there are three clear democratizers. Those are South Korea, Sri Lanka, and Mauritius. All three of those are so-called U-turn cases, which means that they reversed course during a backsliding episode. That said, overall, the global outlook is that, quote, "Democracy is back to 1978 levels for the average global citizen. The gains of the third wave of democratization starting in 1974 in Portugal are almost eradicated." End quote.
So, those are some pretty jarring findings from the V-Dem report, in my opinion, and I was wondering, Steve, if you wanted to start us off by just contextualizing that report a bit for listeners and sharing your thoughts about what the key takeaways are from their updated report this year.
Okay. First of all, V-Dem is a very good organization. Measuring democracy is always somewhat contentious, and there's always some subjective element to it, and different organizations have slightly different measures, slightly different scores, but V-Dem is a pretty reputable organization whose scores I generally trust quite a bit.
I should say that V-Dem's annual reports, which are what go to media and to donors and on social media, tend to be really alarmist. And I think they sometimes make statements that are frankly off the wall, and they did that this year. To say that the world is at 1978 levels of democracy is bizarre. Let's be clear, it's wrong.
In 1978, all of Latin America except for two countries was under full-scale dictatorship, usually military rule. All of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were under communist rule. Every single country in Africa was under authoritarian rule, in most cases single-party rule. And that's obviously not the case today. Latin America is overwhelmingly democratic. East Central Europe is overwhelmingly democratic. Africa's more mixed, but there are a number of democracies in Africa. The world is much, much more democratic than it was in 1978, and the gains of the third wave have not been wiped out.
That said, the individual measures are very careful, and I think they did a pretty good job with the United States. And this conclusion is reinforced by a report that came out from the annual report by another organization that measures democracies, Freedom House, also came out with a report last week, excuse me, with a pretty similar analysis, which ranks now the United States still as a democracy, but as considerably less democratic than all other European and North American democracies.
And in fact, just to give a short list, the countries that V-Dem now considers more democratic than the United States include Sri Lanka, Ghana, Panama, Mauritius, Suriname, Croatia. Those are all pretty unstable democracies over the last generation or two. And it puts the United States in a very, very different camp where, at least since 1965, we have been roughly in the same league as Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Canada. We're now in the same league as Sri Lanka, Panama, Mauritius, Suriname, and Croatia. This is a serious organization, and I think that their measurements are pretty good. And as you mentioned, they did not take elections into account. So, if the 2026 election is crisis-ridden, that will lead to a further downgrading of the United States.
I think it's interesting that both Freedom House and V-Dem came out with their reports in the same week, and I think it highlights how important these reports have become in the sort of public discourse about global democracy and democracy in specific cases. What do you think is the value of people having these types of benchmarking reports as they are trying to think about strategy and how to approach a democracy movement in their own country?
Well, I think it is, I mean, it's very useful for students and scholars who are studying political regimes across the world. I think it's been extraordinarily beneficial in the 21st century for students of democracy.
I think for practitioners, it's very useful to know, again, sort of global patterns and where maybe the cases that they study stand up relative to other countries in the region or across the world. And I think for citizens who generally, you know, may have a sense of what's going on in their country, don't often have any kind of a systematic understanding of where things are in the world or how the United States actually stacks up next to Canada or the UK. It can be really, really informative. So, I think we are much better off in a world in which we've got organizations making, again, there's no perfect measure, and we can contest measurements and scorings of particular cases, but both Freedom House and V-Dem do a pretty credible job, and I think we're all better off with that data than without it.
Yeah. I mean, in my mind there are also some really important opportunities to learn practical lessons from some of the cases that have had turnarounds or U-turns, and those that have what they call bell turns, which is cases that were democratizing that begin to autocratize again. The U-turn cases that I mentioned earlier follow on a paper that was released by some of the same co-authors last year about, you know, what motivates democratic U-turns during a period or a phase of backsliding. And, you know, one of the things they emphasize in that paper is the importance of kind of a mobilized civil society, certainly as you've talked about institutions that are willing to sort of stand up to the backsliding episode.
And I think some of the findings from that U-turn paper are also important when it comes to the timing of these things, because they're able to find patterns about how quickly a backsliding episode can consolidate into authoritarianism and then how hard it is once it's consolidated to try to return to levels prior to that episode. So for strategic thinking it helps, I think, to understand that there are windows of opportunity sort of not to miss in a backsliding episode, because missed opportunities can't really come back around. And I think elections are one of those important opportunities for civil society trying to mobilize against the backsliding.
Yeah, you mentioned the case of South Korea. That wasn't an election. I'm not sure I would call that a case of a U-turn, but rather a failed authoritarian power grab. But it's an excellent example of a rapid and effective mobilization both by civil society, by everyday citizens, and by legislators to push back against the declaration of martial law. I think it is an exemplary case of how to defend democracy.
Yeah, that's right. And I think Brazil maybe is the example of the sort of electoral path to a U-turn.
And judicial path, because the guy who tried to overturn the election in Brazil is sitting in prison today rather than sitting in the presidential palace like in the United States.
Yeah, good point. So I want to shift gears a little bit. One of the topics that you and I haven't really covered in our prior conversations is the relationship between democratic backsliding and international politics. But it's certainly hard to avoid that topic today. And I'm hoping we can focus a little bit on the global implications and impacts of backsliding in the US for what's happening around the world.
So earlier this year we saw the US engage in a unilateral militarized action in Venezuela, which resulted in Nicolas Maduro's abduction from Caracas and imprisonment in New York. And more recently we've seen the US impose an oil blockade on Cuba. An oil blockade is an act of war that is causing major suffering among civilians in Cuba with Trump recently saying that he would soon take the country. And the US and Israel are at war with Iran, having decapitated Iran's senior leadership and in Israel's case restarting hostilities with Lebanon.
And so I think you're a great person to talk to about this because you wrote a book with Lucan Way a couple of years ago called Revolution and Dictatorship on the violent origins of durable authoritarianism. And in it you observe that dictatorships that come to power through revolutionary movements like in Iran, in Cuba, in China are often more durable than those that come to power in other ways. And this year alone we've seen some of these most durable dictatorships in the world threatened or decapitated by the US under Trump. So I'm just really curious what you make of that pattern given the fact that in some of these cases there were many failed movements in those countries trying to have a democratic breakthrough that were not successful or were defeated really, and what we should make of the sort of patterns of durable authoritarianism in a world in which the US is engaged in the world in the manner in which it is right now.
Wow, a lot there. I want to get back to the kind of consequences of having an unaccountable president in the United States and an autocratic presidency in the United States, which I think is doing a tremendous amount of damage both to the country and the global order. But on the question of revolutionary regimes, I mean one thing about revolutionary regimes is they often get into fights, into wars. They often get into conflict either with neighbors or in particular with regional or international superpowers. And Iran and Cuba have both been in conflict with the United States and under threat by the United States for most of the history of these long-lived regimes.
That's one of the reasons why revolutionary regimes end up being pretty durable. They tend to be very ideological. They try to sort of transform the world initially in the first years of the revolution and that very frequently gets them into conflict with superpowers. When you're trying to change the world, the global order, the superpowers in charge of that order are going to fight you. And that happened to Iran, happened to Cuba.
And sometimes revolutionary regimes fail and they lose their wars. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia was overthrown by Vietnam. But when revolutionary regimes survive these early military conflicts, they tend to emerge much stronger. They tend to emerge with a very cohesive elite. They tend to emerge with a big and battle-tested security force that can be turned effectively against its own population. We've seen that in both Cuba and Iran. And so in many, many cases, whether it's the Mexican Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution in the Soviet Union, Vietnam, China, Cuba, Iran, revolutionary regimes very often endure 50, 60, 70, 80 years, which is much longer than your average dictatorship.
I think we're seeing in Iran the robustness of the regime. The United States underestimated the robustness of that regime. Obviously the US and Israel can militarily wipe out Iran. But the expectation was, I think in many quarters, if we just decapitate the leadership, the regime will fall apart. And it is an unpopular regime and there have been massive, massive protests on and off in Iran since 2009 trying to change the regime, to democratize Iran. There's a real powerful democracy movement in Iran. But it is a brutal and very effective regime. And neither mass protest nor decapitation has toppled it. I think it's, you know, very difficult to predict but may well survive this war.
Cuba, we have to see what the US does. Cuba is obviously a very small, very impoverished country that if the United States, you know, were to militarily occupy Cuba, it could change the regime. But Trump has become really enamored with this sort of decapitation strategy that worked, I think somewhat accidentally, but seems in the short term to have worked at least from Trump's perspective in Venezuela. And so I think they're trying to do something similar. They don't want boots on the ground. They don't want to do the work that, for better or worse, is required for regime change in Cuba. So they're going to try to change the leadership and negotiate via gunboat diplomacy the sort of compliance of the new regime.
This in some ways goes back to very early 20th century US-style imperialism in the Caribbean, like old-style gunboat diplomacy. And, you know, if Trump wants to, the US is a very powerful military force. We can take the Panama Canal if we want to. We can take Cuba if Trump wants to. We can take Greenland if Trump wants to. The costs of that on so many dimensions, the medium- and long-term costs are enormous. But militarily, this is the problem with having a rogue presidency, right? If a mad king decides to take Cuba, he can do it.
I'm going to focus specifically on Iran for just a minute and then maybe we can return to your region of expertise a bit. So you just mentioned the concept of a rogue presidency and a mad king. And I'm curious on your initial read, how you're interpreting the onset of the war in Iran. Is it a change in policy positions, which is to say, you know, it's long been the position of both Democratic and Republican administrations in the United States that Iran cannot get a nuclear weapon, that it needs to be contained. There are certainly different strategies to pursue that outcome. But is this just a sort of aggressive change in policy positions, or is this something we need to interpret through a lens of democratic backsliding in the United States that has made the country more prone to war?
Good questions. It's hard to answer because it's very, very difficult to understand what the Trump administration is doing. And in all, you and I have been around for a number of US interventions abroad. We may have agreed with them, we may have disagreed with them. Some of them may have worked okay, some of them didn't work so well. But in all of those cases, whether or not we agreed with them, the interventions, almost all the cases, the interventions were publicly debated. And the administration made its goals and its strategy pretty clear.
In this case, there's been none of that. There's been no public debate. There was not even a whiff of consultation with Congress. And there was no explanation for what the administration is doing. So, we really honestly do not know what the US is trying to do. I think that the evidence is pretty good, and this is evidence from US intelligence, that there was no imminent threat to the United States, and probably not even an imminent threat to Israel. I'm less familiar on that. But at minimum, we had disabled their nuclear program eight months ago, and Iran was in no position to threaten us militarily. So, this was absolutely a war of choice.
Previous administrations had been confronted with Netanyahu proposals to do similar things, and both the Biden and Obama administrations decided it wasn't in the US interest to do it. It wasn't in the US interest to pursue regime change or a long-term military conflict with Iran because the benefits, as we're seeing, are probably not so great relative to the uncertainties and the risks and the economic and other costs. So, this administration does it, and we're still trying to understand why, but in any democracy where there is some public consultation, some degree, even in foreign policy where presidents have much more autonomy, some degree of public deliberation, consultation, some checks on executive power, some deference to the State Department, to diplomacy, to expertise, I think it's very unlikely that the government would pursue this foreign policy.
This was a very costly, reckless war of choice, and it was done because this president, we have a very personalistic government, a personalistic president, who is accountable to no one, who is not accountable to his party, is not accountable to the Congress, is not accountable at all to his cabinet. And when that happens, you can have reckless behavior, you can have destructive behavior, and you just can have mistakes. And I think this was a mistake, a big and costly one.
Yeah, I mean on the constraints on the executive, one of the things I've noticed is that several war powers resolutions have failed in Congress, which is interesting because the war powers resolution is one mechanism through which Congress can insist upon congressional consultation, right? So, it's not even necessarily like that big a constraint. It's just basically saying like the president has to consult with the legislature and conduct war making in a manner in which, you know, there's respect for the fact that the country is a democracy. And those have failed in Congress, right? So, it's sort of like Congress ceding its authorities to the presidency.
That is a consequence of a highly personalistic party. I mean, for the first time in the history of the Republican Party, it has no real institutional life of its own independent of Trump. It is a personalistic party.
Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And I think it's interesting because we actually see that kind of pattern in countries that go to war, whether they're democracies or not. Like, war can actually provoke a backsliding episode by itself. If it happens during a backsliding episode, it can accelerate it. And there's a paper actually that came out in January by Efraim Benmelech and, who else wrote that? Yair Montero. And it came out in the NBER. I think they're economists.
But they show that although there's no particular association between democracy and the onset of international war, there's a very strong association between the onset of war and the further deterioration of democracy at home. And they argue that that's because, quote, "It enables executives to expand their authority and implement institutional changes that would have been difficult to enact in peacetime." End quote. And those institutional changes include things like censorship of the media, purges of the judiciary, restrictions on civil liberties, sometimes suspensions of the constitution, or declarations of martial law, and the like.
And so their argument is actually that the relationship between democracy and war is kind of the reverse, which is war weakens democracy. But there's also a very large international relations literature talking about how democratic backsliding, or really transitions away from democracy to authoritarianism, or even the reverse, are some of the least stable times when it comes to peace for countries. Institutional weakness or institutional incompatibilities at different levels of government or different branches of government can create frictions that mean that the executive is super unconstrained and actually incentivized to try to use the military to shore up institutional stability.
And so, you know, the implications of that usually have been for civil conflict. And there's plenty of research out there suggesting that like mixed regimes, or what are sometimes called anocracies, which are kind of hollowed out democracies, are more likely to have things like civil conflict set on and just have a more difficult time maintaining democracy under those circumstances. So, I think that the implications of the international behavior of the United States are also worrying for the state of democracy here.
And there has been some evidence already of things like threatening media outlets who are not promoting positive coverage of the war with, you know, FCC investigations and things like that. And I think it's just something for Americans to pay attention to when it comes to the ways that the war might begin to further interfere with democracy promotion at home.
Can we talk a little bit about Cuba and your outlook there? I mean, there's not a ton of reporting going on that I've been privy to, but I have paid a little bit of attention to some of the English news sources on it, and it seems like it's a quite desperate situation at this point of people's food spoiling in the refrigerator, people who are growing crops unable to get their crops into the cities because there's no gas for cars, trash piling up in the alleys of Havana because the government doesn't have gas to put in the trucks to collect the garbage, hospitals in blackouts because there's no electricity or backup generators available. So, you know, what happens in a situation like this? Does the country, does the civilian population demand change in its own government? Does it demand that the US, you know, open the sea lanes? Who does it blame, you know, who is the population blame for this kind of suffering? And what are the implications of that for the sort of long-term of the country?
These are tough questions because this is again a pretty unprecedented situation that the Trump administration's strategies are, you know, outside the box, to put it simply. This is just not typical 21st century international relations. You know, it's important to know that the Cuban regime was in bad shape to begin with. The economy was in terrible,
terrible shape, especially really throughout the 2020s since COVID. The regime — there are not good public opinion data, but the regime was pretty unpopular. In recent years, there have been protests in Cuba really for the first time in the history of the revolution, that they protest against the communist regime. So I think there's very good reason to think many, many Cubans would like regime change. And one can never, as you know better than anybody, one can never predict when mass mobilization will occur.
