Economic Crisis and Democracy in Latin America

ABSTRACT 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, proba-bly 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 seekinspiration from the classical thinkers. The worldwidecredit andfinancialmeltdown that began in 2008 has beenaccompanied by almost daily reference to the classics onthe 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. Surpris-ingly, 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 action