Introduction: The impact of the Great Recession and the Commodity Crisis upon Political Representation in Southern Europe and Latin America

Up until the 1990s, comparative studies of Latin American and Southern European politics constituted a common practice in the subfield of comparative politics. However, studies of the two regions in the last couple of decades have taken separate paths on almost every research question. The consolidation of democracy and the increasing Europeanisation of Southern Europe have led many scholars to assume these regions follow different trajectories in most ways, so their joint study became a less common practice. Nevertheless, questions about the distinctiveness of Southern Europe in the European context have come to the fore once again in the wake of the global economic crisis of 2007–8, i.e. the Great Recession and the resulting political developments. As a result, comparisons with Latin American countries that had been largely abandoned are now being revisited. Although Latin America was not immediately affected by the global recession and initially experienced a period of growth and prosperity, the commodity crisis in 2014 triggered a new economic cycle that affected politics directly. This is at the root of a possible right-wing turn and a new political order. Including both comparative chapters and several case studies (from both Southern Europe and Latin America), this volume analyses the impact of severe crisis (both economic and political crises concerning the different ways the political elites deal with the economic crisis) on political representation (both descriptive and substantive representation for Southern Europe, and only substantive representation for Latin America) and citizen support for democracy. We aim to disentangle commonalities and differences about the impact of severe crisis upon political representation and democratic support across the two regions. Additionally, methodological issues in the study of political representation and political elites are also analysed for the two regions.