Economic Crisis and Democracy in Latin America

While the world is focused on the economic impact of the financial and credit meltdown, what might be its impact on politics? In well-established democracies, probably not more than elections lost by incumbent parties seen as having mismanaged the economy.Butwhat of consolidatingdemocracies that predominate in thedevelopingworld, where some forecasts expect the crisis to hit the poor especially hard? This article uses AmericasBarometer survey data from Latin America and the Caribbean drawn on the eve of the crisis to project how it might affect democracy in the region. In times of crisis, scholars and pundits alike often seek inspiration from the classical thinkers. The worldwide credit andfinancialmeltdown that began in 2008 has been accompanied by almost daily reference to the classics on the Great Depression, such as John Kenneth Galbraith’s (1955) study of the stock market crash of 1929, or John Maynard Keynes’s (1936) analysis of recessions and depressions. Surprisingly, however, political scientists seem little concerned about the political consequences of the current economic crisis. Maybe this is because so much attention on the economic crisis has focused on the advanced industrial democracies where the meltdown began, and thereforewe expect nomore than conventional actions from citizens; voters will punish incumbents with “new brooms” to sweep away the crisis and in the process will “throw the bums out.” The great Republican Party losses in the 2008 U.S. elections are a case in point, as are the recent elections in Iceland. In developing countries, however, the current economic crisis may have a far more profound impact. Their economies do not have the deep pockets (or hard currencies) that the governments of advanced industrial societies do, which makes it far more difficult for them to follow the Keynesian prescription that in times of economic slowdowns governments should spend their way out of them. Furthermore, inmany of the developing nations, democracy itself has had only a brief history and is often still in the process of being consolidated.Togauge thepossible political effects of the current severe economic downturn, political scientistsmight do well to turn their attention to their own classics. No more relevant piece of that literature is the J-curve theory of University of Oregon political science professor emeritus James Davies (1962, 5): “Revolutions are most likely to occur when a prolonged period of objective economic and social development is followed by a short period of sharp reversal. People then subjectively fear that ground gained with great effort will be quite lost; their mood becomes revolutionary.”His theory presumes that during extended periods of growth, people come to expect a better future as the norm, but with the onset of a sudden downturn in the ability of the economy to satisfy those expectations, there emerges an “intolerable gap between what people want and what they get” (Davies 1962, 6), driving some individuals to participate in violent protests and even revolution. Davies supports his theorywith an analysis of several rebellions and revolutions, including the French, Russian, and American Revolutions. Predicting rebellions and revolutions remains today about as difficult as it was when Davies wrote more than 40 years ago. Davies himself takes note of mitigating factors. For example, the Great Depression in the U.S. did not produce revolution, largely because of, in his view, the strong actions taken during the Roosevelt years to mitigate its impact on people’s lives. To make sounder predictions, Davies concludes that one needs to be able to assess the “state of mind” of the population by using data emerging from the (then embryonic) field of survey research. Fortunately, the recent widespread growth of surveys among the developing nations makes such an assessment possible for those countries today. In this article, we examine the state of mind of Latin Americans on the eve of the current great economic crisis in order to get a fix on what might be its ultimate impact.We do so with the Abby Córdova is a post-doctoral fellow in the department of political science atVanderbilt University and the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP). She can be reached at [email protected]. Mitchell A. Seligson is Centennial Professor of Political Science, professor of sociology, and director of the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), which coordinates the AmericasBarometer consortium. He can be reached at [email protected]. .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................