Economic Recession, Democratic Recession?

There is plenty of academic research by political scientists, political economists and other disciplines on the economic crisis and its impact, but to date what has been lacking is research on how the crisis has affected democratic systems. This matters as even at the best of times (which these are not) the relationship between the economy and the polity is anything but straightforward. Though traditional accounts of the relationship between economic development and the degree of democracy would lead one to expect that the economic crisis should trigger an erosion of the degree of democracy, an exploratory scan of changes in democracy shows that though 37 countries became less democratic, 22 actually became more democratic from 2008 to 2011. The main research question of the workshop is: Does the economic crisis lead to less or more democracy in existing democracies? The workshop wishes to focus in particular on relatively rich, existing democracies as the current economic crisis is the first severe and persistent post world war II crisis to hit such democracies. It provides a unique opportunity to look at the impact of economic downturns on these countries in a comparative way. We welcome theoretical, comparative and/or case study papers (1) on the relationship between the economic crisis and the procedural quality of democracy, (2) on the role of deliberative mechanisms (such as the Irish and Icelandic constitutional conventions) in these processes and (3) on the interaction between political elites and public opinion in the politics of democratic reform.