The Insecurity-at-Birth Hypothesis: How Economic Volatility at Democratization Hardwires Attitudinal Vulnerabilities and Shapes Regime Trajectories

Building on Lueders (2024), who shows that East Germans’ experiences of insecurity at the moment of regime change magnified the long-run link between economic evaluations and satisfaction with democracy, this project scales the idea cross-nationally. The core claim is that the macroeconomic context at the moment of democratization “imprints” a stronger coupling between pocketbook assessments and democratic support, leaving regimes more brittle when economic shocks recur. Using the Episodes of Regime Transformation (ERT) dataset (Maerz et al. 2023), we can (a) code transitions by the degree of concurrent insecurity (e.g., inflation, unemployment, output volatility in the transition window) and (b) test whether high-insecurity births predict more frequent autocratization episodes or deeper democratic recessions later—even when average performance improves. The twist is to model party discourse as a mediating mechanism: solidarity frames documented by Luypaert and Thijssen (2024) may buffer or amplify this “insecurity imprint.” If parties in high-insecurity-born democracies adopt inclusive, social-insurance-oriented solidarity frames, subsequent downturns might be less politically toxic; exclusionary or workfarist frames could do the opposite. This integrates micro-legacy mechanisms (Lueders) with meso-level ideational dynamics (party frames) and macro trajectories (ERT). It challenges the assumption that economic performance effects are uniform across democracies, proposing instead that performance’s political bite is path-dependent on the conditions of regime birth. If supported, the argument would add a durable, measurable “birth condition” variable to models of democratic resilience and backsliding.

References:

1. When Democracy Brings Insecurity: The Political Legacies of Regime Change. Hans Lueders (2024). World Politics.
2. The comparative politics of solidarity: Political party discourse across three welfare state regimes. Anouk Luypaert, P. Thijssen (2024). Politics & Policy.
3. Episodes of regime transformation. Seraphine F. Maerz, Amanda B. Edgell, M. Wilson, S. Hellmeier, Staffan I. Lindberg (2023). Journal of Peace Research.