CAMBRIDGE — Much in life looks obvious after the fact. The challenge is to understand events and trends earlier, which is especially important when the issue is the demise of democracy.

In their excellent new book “How Democracies Die”, Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt use international experience to examine the question. In recent cases, such as Hungary, Poland, Turkey and Venezuela, or in older ones such as Italy, Germany, Argentina, or Peru, the cause was not the overthrow of an elected government, but the actions of elected leaders.

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Ricardo Hausmann, a former minister of planning of Venezuela and former chief economist of the Inter-American Development Bank, is director of the Centre for International Development at Harvard University and a professor of economics at the Harvard Kennedy School. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2018. www.project-syndicate.org