Democracy in Hard Places

In Democracy in Hard Places, Scott Mainwaring and Tarek Masoud bring together a distinguished group of social scientists to explore how democracies around the world continue to survive even in an age of democratic decline. Adopting a comparative, cross-regional perspective, the authors present nine case studies in which democracy emerged and survived despite tumult and crisis, economic underdevelopment, ethnolinguistic fragmentation, and chronic institutional weakness. By bringing these cases into dialogue with each other, this volume begins to develop a theory of how democracy can be built and maintained in places that dominant social science theories would lead us to least expect it.

Scott Mainwaring is the Eugene and Helen Conley Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. His research and teaching focus on democratization, party systems, and Latin American politics. His book with Aníbal Pérez-Liñán, Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival, and Fall, won the Best Book Prizes of the Democracy and Autocracy section of the American Political Science Association and the Political Institutions section of the Latin American Studies Association. Mainwaring was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010. In April 2019, PS: Political Science and Politics listed him as one of the fifty most cited political scientists in the world. He served as the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor for Brazil Studies and as faculty co-chair of the Brazil Studies program at Harvard University from 2016 to 2019.
Tarek Masoud is the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy
School of Government, and the co-Editor of the National Endowment for Democracy's Journal of Democracy. At the Harvard Kennedy School, he directs the Middle East Initiative and the Initiative on Democracy in Hard Places. He is the author of Counting Islam: Religion, Class, and Elections in Egypt; The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform with Jason Brownlee and Andrew Reynolds; as well as several articles and book chapters. He is a 2009 Carnegie Scholar, a trustee of the American University in Cairo, and the recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation and the Paul and Daisy Soros foundation, among others.