Speaker: Ariel Wilkis (Universidad Nacional de San Martín)
In person at Niagara C0826 and on Zoom (link).
Abstract: This talk builds on the central argument developed in How Finance Shapes Democracy, advancing a bottom-up perspective on the relationship between finance and politics. Focusing on Argentina from the democratic transition in 1983 to the present—including the election of Javier Milei—it analyzes how households, through their everyday experiences with debt, evaluate and judge governments. Rather than treating finance solely as a mechanism of top-down discipline, the approach shows how routine financial practices—such as borrowing, repayment, or default—constitute sites of political judgment in which responsibility, legitimacy, and fairness are continuously assessed. By reconstructing successive regimes of household debt across democratic cycles, the argument demonstrates that these lived financial experiences have played a decisive role in shaping political support, revealing household finance as a constitutive dimension of democratic life and its transformations over time.
This seminar is part of the IUR Brown Bag Seminar Series. Bring your lunch! If you have any questions, please contact Defne Kadioglu and Julie Goodrich.