Daniel Ziblatt

Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University

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-buildingm 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 the American Sociological Association’s 2018 Barrington Moore Prize.

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 a member of the American Academy for Arts and Sciences.