Daniel Ziblatt is Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University where he has been director (interim) of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies and affiliate of the Weatherhead Center. In 2019-2020, he will be the Karl W. Deutsch Visiting Professor at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB) and has been awarded the 2019 Berlin Prize by the American Academy in Berlin

His research focuses on democracy, democratic breakdown, state-building, and historical political economy, with an emphasis on Europe from the nineteenth century to the present. His three books include How Democracies Die (Crown, 2018), co-authored with Steve Levitsky), a New York Times  best-seller, translated into over fifteen languages. He is also the author of Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2017), an account of Europe's historical democratization, which won the American Political Science Association's 2018 Woodrow Wilson Prize for the best book in government and international relations and three other prizes including the American Sociological Association's 2018 Barrington Moore Award for the best book in comparative historical sociology.  His first book was an analysis of 19th century state building, Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy and Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism (Princeton, 2006 [2008]). At Harvard, Ziblatt co-chairs (with Steve Levitsky) the Challenges to Democracy Research Cluster (for postdocs, undergraduates, and PhD students) and directs a research program for graduate and undergraduate students at Harvard's Institute of Quantitative Social Science ("Politics Through Time").  He has been a visiting scholar at Ludwig-Maximilian University (Munich), Sciences Po (Paris), the European University Institute (Florence, Italy), the Max Planck Institute (Cologne), Stanford University and Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.