What is the relationship between finance and democracy? Are they antagonistic or symbiotic? Is the former detrimental to the latter? What influence does the financial community exert in political affairs? These questions were central to an international conference co-hosted on 16 and 17 February by the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, the Centre for Finance and Development, and the Department of International History and Politics.

The conference, organized by Carlo Edoardo Altamura, Ambizione Research Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy and the Department of International History and Politics, and Seung Woo Kim, Research Fellow at the Department of International History and Politics, was divided into five panels on, respectively, themes related to representation; international finance and domestic politics; debt; central banking; and expertise and technology.

On 16 February, Professor Youssef Cassis from the European University Institute delivered the conference’s keynote lecture. In this lecture, he proposed to think of the impact of finance on democracy in multiple ways, including instances when financial elites defend their interests in the political terrain and the political outcome of financial actors. Both, he argued, can have impacts on the functioning of democracy.