ABSTRACT
This chapter starts from the widely accepted wisdom that a democratic regime may be deeply affected by economic crisis. It presents a simple, but especially salient statement: economic crisis mainly affects the quality of democracy. The chapter accepts a theoretical frame for assessing a democracy, how the authors should then empirically detect the impact of economic crisis on the chosen salient dimensions. It aware that the authors might obtain a different response if the assessment of a democracy were conducted by adopting other dimensions. Only a more in-depth and effective empirical analysis - for example, in the four South European democracies - will show if and how the hypotheses developed in a fairly explicit fashion above are to be considered disproved or confirmed, even if only partially. It must be acknowledged that the European Union played a distinctive and important economic and political role in the management of the crisis.
