How Democracies Die

About “How Democracies Die”

This 2018 book by Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt coins mutual tolerance and institutional forbearance as two unwritten democratic norms considered essential "soft guardrails" for a healthy, stable democracy. Mutual tolerance is the shared understanding that political rivals are legitimate; institutional forbearance is self-restraint in exercising legal power. The authors argue erosion of one leads to erosion of the other, causing democratic backsliding.