IAS Academy: Workshop on Democratic Decline and Crime

Worldwide, liberal democracies have been in decline for seventeen consecutive years, oftentimes “slowly, in barely visible steps” (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018). Suggested causes range from economic inequality, misinformation and disinformation, culturally conservative reactions to societal changes, distrust of the population in domestic politics, populist, or personalist politics to external influence from great power politics. Whenever this decline becomes highly visible through an outright attack like January 6th in the United States, liberal democracies respond through criminal cases like sedition trials.

However, interdisciplinary scholarship on crime as a cause and a consequence of global democratic decline remains largely lacking. For example, to what degree do crimes like human trafficking, money laundering and corruption contribute to rising economic inequality within a liberal democracy? And from without a liberal democracy, to what extent do great powers use trafficked laborers or illegally obtained money to weaken foreign politics and the judiciary? Considering that a liberal democracy is a complex adaptive system, this undermining of the governance system from within and without poses challenges that require a more forensically investigated and data-driven agenda for resilience of democracy and the rule of law.