SDF

Adam Przeworski is the Carroll and Milton Professor Emeritus of Politics at New York University. Previously he taught at the University of Chicago and held visiting appointments in India, Chile, China, France, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy, and the National Academy of Science, he is the recipient of the 1985 Socialist Review Book Award, the 1998 Gregory M. Luebbert Article Award, the 2001 Woodrow Wilson Prize, the 2010 Lawrence Longley Article Award, the 2018 Sakip Sabanci International Award, and the 2018 Juan Linz Prize. In 2010, he received the Johan Skytte Prize. He recently published Why Bother with Elections? (Polity Press 2018) and Crises of Democracy (Cam-bridge University Press 2019).

Elections are the most important mechanism for processing whatever conflicts that may arise in a society. They allow conflicts to be processed in liberty and peace if the electoral defeat is not too painful for the losers and if the losers can expect to win in some not too distant future. This mechanism works well in societies that are economically developed and in which alternation in office through elections has become routine. But democracy is fragile, subject to dangers arising from populism and from polarization.