Stone Inequality Book Talk: Susan Stokes

In the first installment of the Stone Program's mini-series on inequality and democracy, political scientist Susan Stokes will discuss her recent book The Backsliders: Why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracies. For more information, click here.

About the book: Democracies around the world are getting swept up in a wave of democratic erosion. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, two dozen presidents and prime ministers have attacked their countries’ democratic institutions, violating political norms, aggrandizing their own powers, and often trying to overstay their terms in office. The Backsliders offers the first general explanation for this wave. Drawing on a wealth of original research, Susan Stokes shows that increasing income inequality, a legacy of late twentieth-century globalization, left some countries especially at risk of backsliding toward autocracy. Left-behind voters were drawn to right-wing ethnonationalist leaders in countries like the United States, India, and Brazil, and to left-wing populist ones in countries like Venezuela, Mexico, and South Africa. Unlike military leaders who abruptly kill democracies in coups, elected leaders who erode them gradually must maintain some level of public support. They do so by encouraging polarization among citizens and also by trash-talking their democracies: claiming that the institutions they attack are corrupt and incompetent. They tell voters that these institutions should be torn down and replaced by ones under the executive’s control. The Backsliders describes how journalists, judges, NGOs, and opposition leaders can put the brakes on democratic erosion, and how voters can do so through political engagement and the power of the ballot box.

Susan Stokes is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor and Director of the Chicago Center on Democracy. Her research and teaching interests include democratic theory and how democracy functions in developing societies, distributive politics, and comparative political behavior. Her single and co-authored books include Mandates and Democracy: Neoliberalism by Surprise in Latin America (2001), Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism: The Puzzle of Distributive Politics (2013), Why Bother? Rethinking Participation in Elections and Protests (2019), and The Backsliders: Why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracies (2025). She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.