Biography

Daniel Ziblatt is Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University and resident faculty at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES). At CES, he co-chairs the Seminar on Democracy – Past, Present, Future.

Ziblatt specializes in the study of European politics, democracy, state-building and historical political economy. He is the author of four books, including How Democracies Die (Crown Publishing Group, 2018), co-authored with Steve Levitsky, a New York Times best-seller and described by The Economist magazine as "the most important book of the Trump era." The book has been translated into thirty languages. In 2017, he authored Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2017), an account of the history of democracy in Europe, which won the American Political Science Association's 2018 Woodrow Wilson Prize for the best book in government and international relations and American Sociological Association's 2018 Barrington Moore Prize. His first book was an analysis of 19th century state building, Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy and Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism (Princeton University Press, 2006).

His newest book, co-authored with Steve Levitsky, is entitled Tyranny of the Minority (Crown Publishing Group, 2023) and will be published in September 2023. The book puts America's contemporary transition into a multiracial democracy in comparative and historical perspective, and shows the distinctive vulnerabilities of the U.S. constitutional order.

In 2023, Ziblatt was elected member of the American Academy for Arts and Sciences.

Affiliations

• Eaton Professor of the Science of Government, Harvard University
• Resident Faculty & Seminar Co-chair, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University
• Unit Director, Transformations of Democracy, WZB Berlin Social Science Center