Political Attitudes During Economic Crisis

The impacts of economic downturns and shocks on public attitudes toward democracy in Latin America is examined by Cordova and Seligson in their article “Economic Shocks and Democratic Vulnerabilities in Latin America and the Caribbean”.  Cordova and Seligson specifically look at the effects of the 2008 economic crisis on attitudes in the region and claim that economic crisis in Latin America can exacerbate already existing issues such as income inequality and underdevelopment which can lead to dissatisfaction with democracy.  Additionally, the poor in these countries are more likely to be disillusioned by democracy in economic downturns because they will feel the effects much more significantly than those who have more wealth which may also deteriorate their belief in the political institutions in their countries as evidenced by the AmericasBarometer survey discussed by the authors.  

The article attempts to find out what economic conditions are most threatening to democracy and how they weaken consolidating democracies in the region by looking at political attitudes expressed in the survey, however the authors do not provide many examples of actual democratic breakdowns apart from the coup in Honduras in 2009.  Although the article provided plenty of evidence that economic crisis leads to poorer views of democracy by the public, I felt the article was lacking on evidence that showed that these negative attitudes actually lead to democratic breakdowns and how people with poor views of democracy have a hand in democratic reversals and breakdowns.  The AmericasBarometer survey, from which the authors got much of their evidence, was carried out in 2008, so I believe modern examples of democratic erosion would be helpful in validating the implications of the survey findings.  The authors’ analysis did find that those who expressed approval of violent participation in the survey were more likely to have participated in a political protest in the past year, but this still does not show if those protests had any effect on the democracies in place in their respective countries.  It is not surprising that there is not further evidence as this article was written in 2010, but it would be more helpful today to look at if any democratic erosions took place in those countries that showed a higher dissatisfaction with democracy during the economic crisis.