Daniel Ziblatt

Daniel Ziblatt is an American political scientist and a professor at Harvard University with a research focus on comparative politics, democracy and democratization as well as the politics and political history of Western Europe. Since 2018 he has been Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University. He is the author of the book Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy. In 2018, Ziblatt also published How Democracies Die with fellow Harvard professor Steven Levitsky. The book examines the conditions that can lead democracies to break down from within, rather than due to external events such as military coups or foreign invasions. How Democracies Die received widespread praise. It spent a number of weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list and six weeks on the non-fiction bestseller list of the German weekly Der Spiegel. The book was recognized as one of the best nonfiction books of 2018 by The Washington Post, Time, and Foreign Affairs.