Precarious Economies, Uncertain Democracies: Economic Insecurity and the Erosion of Democratic Trust in the Global South

Across much of the world, citizens now experience democracy through the texture of their economic lives: volatile prices, precarious and informal employment, household debt, shrinking public provision, and a sense that mobility has stalled. This panel asks how that experience is reshaping democratic governance. Political science has documented democratic erosion in detail; economics has documented insecurity in detail; the two conversations still rarely meet. The panel deliberately convenes economists and political scientists to examine the mechanisms linking material insecurity to declining democratic trust, the rise of personalist and plebiscitary leadership, and the growing appeal of governance arrangements that promise delivery in exchange for accountability.
Three questions organise the panel. First, which forms of economic insecurity actually matter politically? Aggregate growth can coexist with widespread precarity, and perceived insecurity may diverge sharply from measured deprivation. Second, how do states respond? Targeted transfers, subsidy politics, digital welfare delivery and employment guarantees can stabilise consent, yet they may also personalise the state, weaken intermediary institutions, and recast citizens as beneficiaries. Third, what does this mean for the wider system? Trade fragmentation, supply chain realignment, industrial policy, climate transition costs and migration restrictions transmit external shocks into domestic distributive conflict, linking global economic disorder to democratic strain at home.
We welcome single country, comparative and cross regional papers, and particularly encourage work on the Global South, where the relationship between economic delivery and democratic legitimacy is being tested most acutely. Quantitative and qualitative approaches are equally welcome, including survey and electoral analysis, political economy modelling, policy process research, field based and ethnographic work, and studies of subnational variation.
The panel's contribution is integrative rather than descriptive. Instead of asking whether economic hardship produces authoritarian outcomes, it asks under what institutional conditions insecurity is absorbed by democratic politics and under what conditions it corrodes them. By bringing economists and political scientists into a single conversation, the panel aims to specify those conditions with greater precision and to identify the institutional arrangements that make democracies economically survivable.