Democracy is often described in two opposite ways, as either wonderfully resilient or dangerously fragile. Curiously, both characterizations can be correct, depending on the context. When Democracy Breaks aims to deepen our understanding of what separates democratic resilience from democratic fragility by focusing on the latter. The volume’s collaborators—experts in the history and politics of the societies covered in their chapters—explore eleven episodes of democratic breakdown, ranging from ancient Athens and Weimar Germany to present-day Turkey, Russia, and Venezuela. Strikingly, in every case, various forms of democratic erosion long preceded the final democratic breakdown. Although no single causal factor emerges as decisive, linking together all of the episodes, some important commonalities (including extreme political polarization, explicitly antidemocratic political actors, and significant political violence) stand out across the cases. Moreover, the notion of democratic culture, while admittedly difficult to define and even more difficult to measure, may play a role in all of them. Throughout the volume, we see again and again that the written rules of democracy are insufficient to protect against tyranny. They are mere “parchment barriers,” as James Madison once put it, unless embedded within a strong culture of democracy, which itself embraces and gives life not only to the written rules themselves but to the essential democratic values that underlie them.
Online ISBN:9780197760826Print ISBN:9780197760789Publisher:Oxford University PressContents1 Introduction: When Democracy Breaks David Moss and others2 Democratic Collapse and Recovery in Ancient Athens (413–403) Federica Carugati and andJosiah Ober3 The U.S. Secession Crisis as a Breakdown of Democracy Dean Grodzins andDavid Moss4 The Breakdown in Democracy in 1930s Japan Louise Young5 Weimar Germany and the Fragility of Democracy Eric D. Weitz6 The Failures of Czech Democracy, 1918–1948 John Connelly7 September 11, 1973: Breakdown of Democracy in Chile Marian Schlotterbeck8 The Indian Emergency (1975–1977) in Historical Perspective Sugata Bose andAyesha Jalal9 Democratic Breakdown in Argentina, 1976 Scott Mainwaring10 Why Russia’s Democracy Broke Chris Miller11 A Different “Turkish Model”: Exemplifying De-democratization in the AKP Era Lisel Hintz12 Venezuela’s Autocratization, 1999–2021: Variations in Temporalities, Party Systems, and Institutional Controls Javier CorralesEnd Matter
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