The cumulative effects of economic growth on political and economic attitudes: evidence from Latin America

What is the effect of experiencing good or bad macroeconomic environments on political and economicattitudes? Despite decades of research, this central question in political economy remainsunsettled. We advance this debate in two ways: by examining the effects of both positive and negativemacroeconomic environments simultaneously, and by focusing on their cumulative impact overindividuals’ lifetimes. We address this question by examining how lifetime exposure to periods ofunusually high and low economic growth shapes political and economic attitudes in Latin America.We combine annual GDP per capita data from the Maddison Project (1896–2022) with nearly 700,000individual responses from Latinobarómetro and LAPOP (1995–2021) to construct life-course measuresof positive and negative periods for respondents in 18 countries. Our identification strategy comparescohorts within country–year using models with country, survey-year, age, cohort, and survey fixed effects.Repeated positive macroeconomic periods systematically shift individuals toward the right on aleft–right scale and improve subjective economic evaluations. In contrast, repeated negative periodsdo not produce a consistent leftward shift; instead, they increase economic insecurity, dissatisfactionwith democratic performance, and anti-elite sentiment. Support for democracy as a principle remainsstable. We confirm the generalizability of our main findings by replicating our analyses in 104 countriesusing the Integrated Values Survey (1980-2022).