Why do places fall behind, and why does it matter for democracy?

National economies can recover while particular places don’t. A country’s GDP bounces back, unemployment falls and the headlines move on. But some regions keep slipping further behind, both compared with the rest of the country and compared with where they used to be.

My PhD at ISCTE asks what that “falling behind” does to the institutions that hold a democracy together.

A causal chain, not a hunch

It’s easy to tell a story linking economic hardship to political discontent. What’s harder is showing it, and pinning down which economic pressures matter, how they travel through people’s lives and what can interrupt them.

The project tests a specific chain:

1. Structural shocks. Regions are hit by global trade competition, energy price spikes and housing affordability pressures.
2. Relative decline. Some regions are hit harder than others because of the industries, energy needs and housing markets they already had.
3. Economic insecurity. Persistent decline changes what people expect about jobs, incomes and living standards.
4. Institutional instability. That shows up in measurable outcomes: lower trust, lower turnout, more volatile elections and more support for non-mainstream parties.

Throughout, I ask whether policy buffers, such as social transfers, unemployment insurance and active labour market policy, can weaken the chain.

Measuring “falling behind”

Unemployment rates don’t capture the whole story. A region can have middling unemployment yet still be losing ground on wages, on long-term joblessness and on the cost of a home. So part of the project is building a new measure, the Regional Relative Economic Stress Index (RRESI), which tracks sustained divergence from national trends and from a region’s own history.

The key question is not whether institutions matter, but how distributional shocks turn into risks for institutional stability.

Why these four countries?

Portugal, Italy, Greece and France all share the euro and its constraints. They differ a lot in how their regions have adjusted, which makes them a good setting for comparison. The data runs from 1995 to 2025 at the regional (NUTS-2) level, linked to survey data on how people actually feel.

Why this matters to me

I spent years in local government in Wales setting budgets for communities that often felt left behind. I saw up close how economic change shapes trust in institutions. This research is my attempt to measure that relationship properly.

I’ll be writing here as the project develops. If you work on anything related, get in touch.