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

What is the effect of experiencing good or bad macroeconomic environments on political and economic attitudes? Despite decades of research, this central question in political economy remains unsettled. We advance this debate in two ways: by examining the effects of both positive and negative macroeconomic environments simultaneously, and by focusing on their cumulative impact over individuals’ lifetimes. We address this question by examining how lifetime exposure to macroeconomic positive and negative periods shapes political and economic attitudes in Latin America. We combine annual GDP per capita data from the Maddison Project (1896–2022) with nearly 700,000 individual responses from Latinobarómetro and LAPOP (1995–2021) to construct life-course measures of positive and negative periods for respondents in 18 countries. Our identification strategy compares cohorts 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 a left–right scale and improve subjective economic evaluations. In contrast, repeated negative periods do not produce a consistent leftward shift; instead, they increase economic insecurity, dissatisfaction with democratic performance, and anti-elite sentiment. Support for democracy as a principle remains stable. We confirm the generalizability of our main findings by replicating our analyses in 104 countries using the Integrated Values Survey (1980-2022).