How to Lose a Democracy: What America Can Learn from the Rest of the World
Title: How to Lose a Democracy: What America Can Learn from the Rest of the World
Abstract: Buried within the general phenomenon of democratic decline is a set of cases in which charismatic new leaders are elected by democratic publics and then use their electoral mandates to dismantle by law the constitutional systems they inherited. These leaders aim to consolidate power and to remain in office indefinitely, eventually eliminating the ability of democratic publics to exercise their basic democratic rights, to hold leaders accountable, and to change their leaders peacefully. Because these “legalistic autocrats” deploy the law to achieve their aims, impending autocracy may not be evident at the start. But we can learn to spot the legalistic autocrats before autocratic constitutionalism becomes fatal because they are often following a script using tactics that they borrow from each other.
Bio: Professor Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University and (in fall 2025) Visiting Professor of Law at Stanford. Scheppele's work focuses on the rise and fall of constitutional democracy. After 1989, Scheppele studied the new constitutional courts of Hungary and Russia, living in both places for extended periods. After 9/11, she researched the effects of the international "war on terror" on constitutional protections around the world. Since 2010, she has been documenting attacks on constitutional democracy by legalistic autocrats. Her book Destroying (and Restoring) Democracy by Law is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. Scheppele is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the International Academy of Comparative Law. In 2014, she received the Law and Society Association’s Kalven Prize for influential scholarship in comparative constitutional law and in 2024, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work on democratic backsliding. She was President of the Law and Society Association from 2017-2019.