Daniel Ziblatt

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Daniel Ziblatt (* 1972 ) is an American political scientist with a research focus on democracy and democratization as well as the politics and political history of Western Europe since the 19th century. Since 2018 he has been Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University .

Life

Ziblatt, the 1990/91 part of his high school years for half a year in Hinterzarten (Southern Black Forest) on the boarding school Birklehof spent, where he learned German and "emerged in which his interest in politics," graduated from Pomona College Claremont , a bachelor with the main subjects German and political science , which he graduated in 1995. In 2003 he completed his postgraduate studies as a Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of California . Ziblatt has been teaching and researching at the Department of Government at Harvard University since 2003 , initially as Assistant Professor of Government Studies and Social Sciences (2003–2007), Associate Professor of Government Studies and Social Sciences (2007–2009) and Paul Sack Associate Professor of Political Economy (2009–2007) 2010), from 2011 as professor for government and since 2018 as Eaton professor for government. In 2014 and 2019 he was Deputy Director of the Minda De Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University.

Ziblatt was visiting professor at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich , at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris , at the European University Institute in Florence , at Stanford University and at the Berlin Science Center for Social Research .

Research activity

Ziblatt researches the democratization movements as well as the history and development of democracy. Together with Michael Koß he is "one of the most prominent democracy researchers of the present." For his work Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy , in which he looks at the historical democratization of Europe, he received the Woodrow Wilson Prize of American Political Science in 2018 Association for the best book on government and international relations and Barrington Moore award of the American Sociological Association for the best book in comparative historical sociology.

Ziblatt received special attention with the work How Democracies Die ( How democracies die. And what we can do about it. ), In which he and Steven Levitsky describe the erosion of democratic institutions and processes with a view to the United States , Latin America and Europe . The book has been translated into 22 languages, was on the New York Times bestseller list and received the NDR Kultur Sachbuchpreis in 2018 and the Goldsmith Book Prize in 2019 . The authors succeed in "convincing [to] show which indicators show a slide into authoritarianism [...] and how continually democratic norms have been violated", but they fail to generalize the findings, Isabell Trommer reviewed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . Tim Caspar Boehme praised in the taz “that the political scientists orientate themselves objectively to political actions instead of psychologizing”. Lukas Leuzinger, who reviewed in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung , on the other hand, sees the two authors “not specialists in US politics”, but they manage “broader perspective on developments”, but it is surprising that Ziblatt and Levitsky “are less the institutions than blame the political elites for this development [extreme polarization and an erosion of democratic norms] ”.

In an interview in 2020, Ziblatt analyzed Donald Trump that "warning signs that he does not respect the constitution and democracy [...] had existed from the start". According to Ziblatt, however, it is reassuring that "[a] certain level of authoritarian incompetence [...] has so far saved the US from worse".

Fonts (selection)

  • Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy and Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism. Princeton University Press, Princeton 2006, ISBN 978-0691136493 .
  • Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2017, ISBN 978-1139030335 .
  • with Steven Levitsky : How Democracies Die. Crown / Penguin Random House, New York 2018, ISBN 978-0525574538 ; German: How democracies die: and what we can do about it. German publishing company; ISBN 978-3421048103 .

Sources and further reading

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cf. introduction to the interview with Daniel Ziblatt: "Without the Birklehof I would never have written my book"; in "Birklehof Notes", Issue 32, Nov. 2019, DNB 02216331X , p. 62
  2. ↑ Daniel Ziblatt. Eaton Professor of the Science of Government, Harvard University. In: zeit.de. The time , accessed April 5, 2020 .
  3. ^ Thomas Kemmerich and Björn Höcke: The handshake from Erfurt. In: zeit.de. Die Zeit , February 6, 2020, accessed on April 5, 2020 .
  4. ↑ Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt: How Democracies Die. And what we can do about it. In: perlentaucher.de. Pearl divers , accessed April 5, 2020 .
  5. ↑ Karl Doemens: The autocracy begins creeping . Interview with Daniel Ziblatt. In: Medienhaus Bauer (ed.): Marler Zeitung . Marl June 6, 2020, p. 19 .
personal data
SURNAME Ziblatt, Daniel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American political scientist
DATE OF BIRTH 1972