How to Save a Constitutional Democracy

Drawing expertly on examples from across the world, Ginsburg and Huq highlight the constitutional mechanisms by which democracies may be undermined--often by elected leaders themselves--in the contemporary era. They make a compelling case that the United States is not immune to democratic backsliding, and they point to various ways in which the US Constitution leaves us vulnerable to such backsliding. Finally, whereas other recent books on the crisis of American democracy focus on what has gone wrong, Ginsburg and Huq provide us with clear-eyed proposals--including some bold constitutional reforms--for how to fix it. I strongly recommend this book. --Steven Levitsky, coauthor of How Democracies Die This book makes a huge contribution to our understanding of how democracies erode and what institutional reforms would make it harder for authoritarian populists to entrench their power. It should be required reading for anybody who seeks to bolster the stability of embattled democracies around the world. --Yascha Mounk, author of The People vs. Democracy This is an important book--probably the most impressive marshaling of comparative literatures I have seen on this crucial set of issues. Using a wide range of examples, Ginsburg and Huq show how healthy democracies can mutate into autocratic or oligarchic systems, and they offer an incisive account of how this might happen in the United States. A cautionary tale told with case studies from around the world, this is a sobering analysis of our trying times. --Jack M. Balkin, Yale Law School Awe inspiring. How to Save a Constitutional Democracy is masterfully informed, crystal clear, and exceptionally sober. I learned an enormous amount. --Adam Przeworski, New York University How to Save a Constitutional Democracy explores the extraordinary challenges democracies face from populist leaders today, above all in the United States. It suggests that our institutions may not be as resilient as we would like to believe, but proposes concrete ways in which they might be strengthened based on wide-ranging knowledge of the experiences of other countries facing similar threats. --Francis Fukuyama, Stanford University