Daniel Ziblatt is Eaton Professor of the Science of Government and director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES) at Harvard University.
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 most recent book, co-authored with Steve Levitsky, is entitled Tyranny of the Minority (Crown Publishing Group, 2023). It 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.
For general inquiries, please contact Assistant to the Directors and Programs Liam Downing. For media inquiries and interview requests in North America, please contact Director of Communication Gila Naderi.
Fall Course:
Liberal Democracy and its Critics (SOC-STD 98LR)
Bischof, Daniel, Hanno Hilbig, and Daniel Ziblatt. "Wealth of Tongues: Why Peripheral Regions Vote for the Radical Right in Germany .” American Political Science Review (2023): 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055423000862.
Capoccia, Giovanni, and Daniel Ziblatt. “The Historical Turn in Democratization Studies: A New Research Agenda for Europe and Beyond.” Comparative Political Studies 43, no. 8-9 (2010): 931–68. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414010370431.
Dasgupta, Aditya, and Daniel Ziblatt. "Capital Meets Democracy: The Impact of Franchise Extension on Sovereign Bond Markets." American Journal of Political Science 66, no. 3 (2022): 630-647. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12585.
Dasgupta, Aditya, and Daniel Ziblatt. “How Did Britain Democratize? Views from the Sovereign Bond Market.” The Journal of Economic History 75, no. 1 (2015): 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0022050715000017.
Şaşmaz, Muharrem Aytug, Alper Yagci, and Daniel Ziblatt. “How Voters Respond to Presidential Assaults on Checks and Balances: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Turkey.” Comparative Political Studies, 55 no. 11 (2022): 1947-1980. https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140211066216.
Ziblatt, Daniel. “Shaping Democratic Practice and the Causes of Electoral Fraud: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Germany.” American Political Science Review 103, no. 1 (2009): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0003055409090042.
In 2018, Daniel Ziblatt received the following awards for his book Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracies:
