Examining the history of democratic fragility
A new open access volume co-edited by Professor Archon Fung, When Democracy Breaks, explores 11 instances of democratic breakdown throughout history, ranging from ancient Athens to Weimar Germany to present-day Turkey, Russia, and Venezuela. The book identifies several important factors in these historic and more modern cases, including extreme political polarization, explicitly anti-democratic political actors, and the use of significant political violence. “History, and especially the history of democratic breakdown, can provide new insight into the line separating democratic resilience from democratic fragility,” write Fung and his co-editors. |