Steven Levitsky (born January 17, 1968) is an American political scientist currently serving as a professor of government at Harvard University and a senior fellow for democracy at the Council on Foreign Relations.

[3] After obtaining his Ph.D. in 1999, Levitsky was a visiting fellow at the University of Notre Dame's Kellogg Institute for International Studies.

[6] Levitsky is known for his work with University of Toronto professor Lucan Way on "competitive authoritarian" regimes, that is, hybrid government types in which, on the one hand, democratic institutions are generally accepted as the means to obtaining and exercising political power, but, on the other hand, incumbents violate the norms of those institutions so routinely, and to such an extent, that the regime fails to meet basic standards for democracy; under such a system, incumbents almost always retain power, because they control and tend to use the state to squelch opposition, arresting or intimidating opponents, controlling media coverage, or tampering with election results.

[7] Writing about the phenomenon in 2002, Levitsky and Way named Serbia under Slobodan Milošević and Russia under Vladimir Putin as examples of such regimes.

The book examines the conditions that can lead democracies to break down from within, rather than due to external events such as military coups or foreign invasions.