The stability and quality of democracy affect economic growth and the business environment — increased polarisation also carries corporate risks, including that of boycotts. Behavioural experiments increasingly find partisan polarisation seeps into all sorts of consumer decision-making as well, says Laura Jakli.
In the past decades, subnational cooperation between municipalities and regions has become more common all over the world. In Europe and its neighborhood this tendency has been especially visible, much due to policy advocacy and technical assistance by regional intergovernmental organizations such as the Council of Europe, the European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. This development accelerated in the 1990s in tandem with the transition and democratization processes that started after the fall of the Soviet Union. However, in many places democratization has stopped or started to reverse, leading to backsliding away from democracy. While democracy as always been different in crossborder regions due to the special status of their governance arrangements, this new development accentuates a need for new tools to understand the implications of various threats to democracy for the future of crossborder cooperation. This Perspective article provides an over