Institute for European Studies Luigi Einaudi Distinguished Lecture

Until 2005, the number of democracies in the world kept increasing, but after that date, the number has declined. Even robust democracies are now showing signs of weakness and some have turned into hybrid regimes suspended between democracy and autocracy. What is killing off the world’s democracies - and what can be done about it?

In her forthcoming book Destroying Democracy by Law,  Kim Lane Scheppele explores the countries in which aspirational autocrats have undermined democracies. With examples from Hungary, Poland, Venezuela, Ecuador, Turkey, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States and beyond, Scheppele shows how democracies no longer die with tanks in the streets. Instead, democracies die when aspirational autocrats come to power through elections and then use legal methods to undermine constraints on their power. With law as their weapon, aspirational autocrats damage the institutions that provide checks and balances, compromise the independence of the judiciary, stifle civil society, muzzle the press and use the power of the state against those who might challenge their monopoly on power. Scheppele explains how the new legal tools work, how they circulate from one budding autocracy to another and why international observers have been slow to recognize the problem. She also provides some ideas for reversing these processes through law wielded by new democratic movements.

Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She is also a faculty fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Her primary field is the sociology of law, and she specializes in ethnographic and archival research on courts and public institutions. She also works in sociological theory, comparative/historical sociology, political sociology, sociology of knowledge, and human rights.