When Democracy Breaks : Studies in Democratic Erosion and Collapse, from Ancient Athens to the Present Day

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence.It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Democracy is often described in two opposite ways, as either wonderfully resilient or dangerously fragile.Both characterizations can be correct, depending on the context.When Democracy Breaks aims to deepen our understanding of what separates democratic resilience from democratic fragility by focusing on the latter.The volume's collaborators--experts in the history and politics of the societies covered in their chapters--explore eleven episodes of democratic breakdown, from ancient Athens to Weimar Germany to present-day Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela.Strikingly, in every case, various forms of democratic erosion long preceded the final democratic breakdown.Although no single causal factor emerges as decisive, linking together all of the episodes, some important