When does Social Injustice lead to Political Instability?
Article on BTI 2012 results published in journal Americas Quarterly:"Social Exclusion and Political Change" suggests that in most cases, massive social protests are not an immediate result of strongly deteriorating levels of socioeconomic development, but rather constitute a long-term reaction to the lack of prospects resulting from continuous impoverishment and social marginalization.
Overcoming poverty and social inequality is not only a moral imperative – it is also key for a sustainable political and economic development. But when and under which conditions do dissatisfaction and frustration about social exclusion result in systemic crises of political systems? When do they lead to regime change? In their article "Social Exclusion and Political Change" for the renowned US-journal Americas Quarterly, Hauke Hartmann and Daniel Schraad-Tischler relied on the comprehensive data material of the Transformation Index BTI and the Sustainable Governance Indicators SGI to study the connection between injustice and instability.
Their analysis suggests that in most cases, massive social protests are not an immediate result of strongly deteriorating levels of socioeconomic development, but rather constitute a long-term reaction to the lack of prospects resulting from continuous impoverishment and social marginalization. The degree of social inclusion, in turn, is not solely dependent on economic strength and prosperity, in developing countries and in OECD member states alike, but closely relates to political steering capability.
The likelihood of social protests resulting in political turmoil and systemic crises is considerably higher in authoritarian regimes and defective democracies than in consolidated democracies. A crucial determiner is to what degree social protest can be expressed freely and without state repression and how deeply involved civil society is in the political decision-making process. Authoritarian regimes which aim to repress political and social protests systematically run the highest risk to be overthrown once public dissatisfaction vehemently expresses itself. This has been vividly demonstrated by the Arab Spring.
The quality of democratic structures thus is the decisive determiner for the concrete correlation between social injustice and political (in)stability.