Economics and Political Science are two fields that study distribution. Economics studies
the distribution of resources under scarcity. Political Science is a study of who gets what, when,
and how. Despite being inextricably linked, the two fields are often studied in complete isolation.
The Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 sent shockwaves across the world. Economists have studied
and published an immense amount of papers and articles describing the economic impacts of the
recession. However, there was very little literature on the global political impacts of the Great
Recession. This paper is an attempt to bridge the two fields and understand what impacts the
Great Recession had on democracies around the world. This study answers this question by
looking at World Bank data that describes the economic impacts of the recession on
democracies. It also uses the World Bank to understand levels of inequality in these countries.
Next, using extensive data from Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) it measures the levels of
democracy on three major indexes- the Egalitarian Index, the Deliberative Index, and the Liberal
Index. The study is concluded with an interpretation and discussion of the results as well as the
implications of these findings
