Steven Levitsky
Moderator
Director, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies; David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies; Professor of Government, Harvard
Political Violence as a Vocation: How Politicians Shape Citizens’ Demand for Police Repression
Date and Time
September 29, 2026
12:00PM - 01:30PM EDT
Location
CGIS South, Room S216
No registration required to attend in person.
Police violence against marginalized groups persists in many democracies. Yet, democratically-elected leaders may lack incentives to curb it because repressive policing often enjoys widespread support, and views toward police violence often mirror cleavages like partisanship and race. We posit that politicians leverage polarized attitudes toward police violence through repression-based appeals, justifying state coercion beyond the rule of law by framing marginalized groups as security threats. Using a survey experiment in Brazil, our results show that politicians derive political benefits from repression-based appeals through improved perceptions of competence, and pay a cost for criticizing police violence, particularly when they defy partisan expectations. We further demonstrate that politicians’ statements defending police violence can increase support for such killings, with important partisan heterogeneity. Our findings reveal that police violence is political violence: rather than representing an aberration or “bad apples,” politicians have incentives to strategically leverage repression-based appeals for political gain
This event is presented in collaboration with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
Yanilda Gonzalez
Speaker
The Ford Foundation Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School
Bios
Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He is Senior Fellow at the Kettering Foundation and a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions, with a focus on Latin America. He is co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times Best-Seller and was published in 30 languages, and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. He has written or edited 11 other books, including Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2003), Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (with Lucan Way) (Princeton University Press, 2022). He and Lucan Way are currently working on a book on democratic resilience across the world.
Professor Levitsky has written for New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and The New Republic, and he has been a columnist for La Republica (Peru) and Folha de São Paulo (Brazil).
Yanilda María González is the Ford Foundation Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research focuses on policing, state violence, and citizenship in democracy, examining how race, class, and other forms of inequality shape these processes.
González’s book Authoritarian Police in Democracy: Contested Security in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2020), studies the persistence of police forces as authoritarian enclaves in otherwise democratic states, demonstrating how ordinary democratic politics in unequal societies can both reproduce authoritarian policing and bring about rare moments of expansive reforms. Authoritarian Police in Democracy received the Gregory Luebbert Prize for Best Book in Comparative Politics from the American Political Science Association (2022), as well as the Donna Lee Van Cott Award for Best Book on Latin American Politics and Institutions from the Latin American Studies Association (2022). González received the Clarence Stone Scholar Award from the Urban and Local Politics Section of the American Political Science Association (2022).
González received her PhD in Politics and Social Policy from Princeton University. Prior to joining HKS she was an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. González previously worked at a number of human rights organizations in the US and Argentina, including the New York Civil Liberties Union, ANDHES, and Equipo Latinoaméricano de Justicia y Género.