Venezuela at a Crossroads: Regime Transition and Democratic Futures

Javier Corrales is the Dwight W. Morrow 1895 professor of Political Science at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts.  He obtained his Ph.D. in government from Harvard University in 1996. He is internationally recognized as a leading expert on democratization, democratic governance, democratic backsliding, populism, and authoritarianism. His research and teaching focuses on Latin America and Europe. He has published eight books and more than 50 research articles and book chapters.  His latest book, Autocracy Rising (Brookings Institution Press, 2023), discusses how Venezuela became a dictatorship and draws comparisons from various cases in the region.  He periodically teaches short courses at the University of Amsterdam, and often writes opeds for The New York Times, Foreign Policy, and the Washington Post.

Freddy Guevara  is a political leader, freedom fighter, and democracy advocate.

Guevara co-founded the Venezuelan progressive party Voluntad Popular in 2010, was the top-voted congressman in 2015, Vice President of Venezuela’s Parliament in 2016, and leader of the non-violent civil uprising against Maduro’s dictatorship in 2017. As a result of his political activism, Guevara became a target of political persecution, resulting in the loss of his freedom for three years. During this time, he was a refugee in the Chilean Embassy in Caracas, a political prisoner, and has been in exile since August 2021. He was appointed to the Opposition Unitary Platform in negotiations with Maduro’s regime, and in 2023 as President of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Venezuelan Parliament in exile.

Guevara’s work at the Harvard Kennedy School has spanned the gamut. He worked as a research fellow for the Democracy in Hard Places Initiative headed by Tarek Masoud and graduated from the Mid-Career Masters in Public Administration program in 2024. Guevara currently works with Erica Chenoweth as a research fellow at the Nonviolent Action Lab, a program that he’s been involved with since 2022.

Dorothy Kronick is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on contemporary Latin American politics, with particular attention to Venezuelan politics and the politics of crime and policing. Her work has been published in American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Science, and Science Advances, among other outlets. Her commentary on Venezuelan politics has appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post.

José Morales-Arilla is a Research Professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey’s Graduate School of Government and Public Transformation. His research focuses on political economy and development economics, and his work leverages advanced quantitative methods to examine the political causes and consequences of some of today’s most pressing development challenges, including inequality, violence, trade, migration, and economic growth. He holds a PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University and conducted postdoctoral research at Princeton University and Harvard’s Growth Lab. Prior to his current appointment, he served as an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government and Public Service.

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).