 Levitsky is an advisor to several student organizations, including the Harvard Association Cultivating Inter-American Democracy (HACIA Democracy) and the POLITAI Civil Association at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, where he also taught as a visiting scholar.Levitsky is known for his work with Lucan Way on "competitive authoritarian" regimes, that is, hybrid government types in which, on the one hand, democratic institutions are generally accepted as the means to obtaining and exercising political power, but, on the other hand, incumbents violate the norms of those institutions so routinely, and to such an extent, that the regime fails to meet basic standards for democracy; under such a system, incumbents almost always retain power, because they control and tend to use the state to squelch opposition, arresting or intimidating opponents, controlling media coverage, or tampering with election results.Writing about the phenomenon in 2002, Levitsky and Way named Serbia under Slobodan Milošević and Russia under Vladimir Putin as examples of such regimes.