Where is the V Conference “Democracy and Inequalities” being held?

The conference is taking place in José C. Paz, ARG.

V Conference “Democracy and Inequalities”

Name: V Conference “Democracy and Inequalities”
Start: 2026-09-17T00:00:00Z
End: 2026-09-18T00:00:00Z
Location: José C. Paz

Sep 17–18, 2026José C. Paz, ArgentinaIn-person

Registration open

The V Conference “Democracy and Inequalities” is an academic event hosted in José C. Paz, Argentina. This conference serves as a crucial platform for exploring the intricate relationship between democratic systems and various forms of inequality. It brings together researchers, academics, and practitioners to discuss contemporary challenges and potential solutions in this critical area.

Committees & topics

Topics
The State of Democracy in the Twenty-First Century · Global Inequalities in the Twenty-First Century · Democracy and Development in Latin America · The Reordering of the Global Order · Socioeconomic Disparities and Inclusive Growth · Political Disparities and Unequal Representation · Wealth Concentration and the Return of Patrimonial Capital · Power Concentration in States, Markets, and Platforms

Why it matters

The intersection of democracy and inequality is a defining challenge of our time, impacting governance, social cohesion, and economic stability across the globe. This conference provides a vital forum for in-depth analysis of how democratic institutions both contribute to and are affected by disparities in wealth, power, and opportunity. Understanding these dynamics is essential for fostering more equitable and resilient societies.

Discussions at the conference will likely delve into the mechanisms through which inequalities can erode democratic principles, such as unequal access to political participation, the influence of economic elites, and the marginalization of certain groups. Conversely, it will also examine how democratic processes can be leveraged to address and mitigate existing inequalities, promoting social justice and inclusive development. The insights generated from such discussions are invaluable for policymakers and civil society organizations working to strengthen democratic governance and reduce societal divides.

How to prepare

For those preparing to engage with the themes of democracy and inequality, a comprehensive understanding of stakeholder dynamics is paramount. The "power-interest grid" lesson offers a framework for identifying and analyzing the influence of various actors, from governmental bodies to grassroots movements, in shaping policy and societal outcomes related to inequality. This can help in anticipating different perspectives and potential areas of conflict or collaboration.

Furthermore, considering "hidden stakeholders" is crucial, as often the most vulnerable or marginalized groups, who are disproportionately affected by inequalities, may not have direct representation or a strong voice. Understanding how to identify and advocate for these groups, as explored in the "engagement strategies" lesson, is key to developing truly inclusive and democratic solutions. Finally, applying "dynamic analysis" can help in understanding how the relationship between democracy and inequality evolves over time and in response to various internal and external pressures.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 3 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Argentina

As the host nation, ARG provides a relevant context for discussions on democracy and inequality, given its historical and ongoing efforts to navigate economic fluctuations and social disparities within a democratic framework.

Role in topic

ARG's experience with democratic transitions and economic challenges offers a case study for examining the resilience of democratic institutions in the face of significant inequalities. Its academic institutions are actively engaged in research on social justice and political participation.

Brazil

BRA faces significant challenges in reconciling its democratic structures with deep-seated social and economic inequalities, making it a key country for comparative analysis.

Role in topic

BRA's vast social and economic disparities, coupled with its vibrant but often turbulent democratic processes, provide a rich context for studying the interplay between political systems and inequality. Debates around land reform, racial justice, and access to public services are central to its national discourse.

Mexico

MEX grapples with regional inequalities and the impact of economic policies on different segments of its population, offering insights into the complexities of democratic governance in a diverse nation.

Role in topic

MEX's efforts to address poverty, corruption, and the influence of organized crime within its democratic framework highlight the multifaceted challenges of inequality. Its experiences with social programs and electoral reforms are relevant to discussions on strengthening democratic institutions.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

The State of Democracy in the Twenty-First Century

Modern democratic governance traces its institutional roots to the constitutional revolutions of the late eighteenth century and expanded dramatically through three documented 'waves' of democratization identified by Samuel Huntington: the post-World War I expansion, the post-1945 decolonization wave, and the post-1974 wave that began with Portugal's Carnation Revolution and culminated in the collapse of Soviet-bloc regimes between 1989 and 1991. By the mid-1990s, Freedom House and similar indices recorded a historic high in the number of electoral democracies, and liberal democracy was widely treated as the default trajectory of political modernization. Since roughly 2006, however, V-Dem, Freedom House, and the Economist Intelligence Unit have documented a sustained period of 'democratic backsliding,' in which incumbents in countries such as Hungary, Turkey, India, the Philippines, and Venezuela have eroded judicial independence, press freedom, and electoral integrity from within constitutional frameworks. Consolidated democracies including the United States have also experienced documented stress, exemplified by the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol and growing affective polarization. Concurrently, the rise of China as an authoritarian great power has offered an alternative governance model emphasizing state capacity over political pluralism. Today the debate centers on whether democratic decline is cyclical or structural, and on which interventions — campaign-finance reform, digital platform regulation, civic education, electoral system redesign — can restore public trust. International instruments such as the UN's Sustainable Development Goal 16 and the Summit for Democracy process launched by the United States in 2021 attempt to coordinate responses, but enforcement remains weak and contested.

Key players

Global Inequalities in the Twenty-First Century

Inequality has become one of the defining issues of contemporary political economy. Thomas Piketty's 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century' (2013) and the subsequent work of the World Inequality Lab documented that income and wealth concentration in advanced economies returned to levels last seen before World War I, reversing the mid-century 'Great Compression.' Between-country inequality narrowed significantly after 2000, largely because of rapid growth in China and India, but within-country inequality rose in most major economies, including the United States, the United Kingdom, China, and Russia. The drivers are well documented: skill-biased technological change, globalization of supply chains, declining union density, regressive tax reforms, and the financialization of housing and capital markets. Oxfam's annual Davos reports and the World Inequality Report consistently find that the top 1% has captured a disproportionate share of post-2008 and post-pandemic gains. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated these trends, with billionaire wealth rising sharply while informal workers in the Global South suffered the largest income losses. Policy responses are debated within the OECD's Inclusive Framework — which produced the 2021 agreement on a 15% global minimum corporate tax — and at the UN, where Brazil's 2024 G20 presidency placed a coordinated tax on the ultra-wealthy on the global agenda. Gender, racial, and geographic inequalities remain entrenched dimensions that intersect with income disparities.

Key players

Democracy and Development in Latin America

Latin America's democratic trajectory has been shaped by a long oscillation between civilian and military rule. The 'bureaucratic-authoritarian' regimes that dominated the Southern Cone in the 1960s and 1970s — Brazil (1964), Argentina (1976), Chile (1973), Uruguay (1973) — gave way during the 1980s to a regional wave of redemocratization, often negotiated rather than revolutionary. By the mid-1990s nearly every country in the region held competitive elections, and the 2001 Inter-American Democratic Charter codified a hemispheric commitment to representative democracy. The region nonetheless combines formal democracy with the world's highest income inequality, persistent informal labor markets, and weak rule of law. The early-2000s commodity boom funded the 'Pink Tide' of left-wing governments that reduced poverty significantly but left structural inequalities largely intact. The subsequent commodity bust produced a swing toward the right, followed by another leftward turn in Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Brazil, and Honduras. Venezuela's collapse under Nicolás Maduro, Nicaragua's authoritarian consolidation under Daniel Ortega, and Nayib Bukele's popular but rights-restrictive security model in El Salvador illustrate the diversity of regime trajectories. Current debates focus on organized crime and state capture, migration flows toward the United States, Chinese economic penetration through trade and Belt and Road infrastructure, and whether constitutional processes — as attempted in Chile in 2022 and 2023 — can renew the social contract.

Key players

The Reordering of the Global Order

The post-1945 international order rested on the UN Charter, the Bretton Woods institutions, and — after 1991 — a period of unipolar U.S. primacy that scholars labeled the 'liberal international order.' This order combined open trade, multilateral institutions, and a normative emphasis on human rights and democracy. Its credibility was damaged by the 2003 Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, the failure to resolve the Syrian conflict, and the perceived double standards in Western responses to crises in the Global South. Three shifts now define the current transition. First, the rise of China has produced genuine bipolar economic and technological competition, particularly in semiconductors, AI, and green-energy supply chains. Second, Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 represented the most direct challenge to the territorial-integrity norm since 1945 and accelerated NATO expansion to include Finland and Sweden. Third, a more assertive 'Global South' — articulated through BRICS expansion in 2024, the G20, and African Union accession to the G20 — is demanding reform of the UN Security Council, the IMF quota system, and global financial architecture. The Israel–Gaza war since October 2023 has further strained the legitimacy of Western-led institutions, with South Africa's genocide case at the International Court of Justice and ICC arrest warrants illustrating contested enforcement of international law. The order is not collapsing but visibly fragmenting into overlapping blocs and minilateral arrangements.

Key players

Socioeconomic Disparities and Inclusive Growth

Socioeconomic disparities encompass gaps in income, wealth, education, health, and access to public services. The World Bank's 2022 'Poverty and Shared Prosperity' report concluded that the COVID-19 pandemic reversed roughly a decade of progress in global poverty reduction, with the steepest setbacks in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Within wealthy countries, the OECD has tracked widening gaps in life expectancy, educational attainment, and intergenerational mobility correlated with parental income — what Raj Chetty's research has called the 'fading American Dream.' Structural drivers include automation and the polarization of labor markets into high-skill and low-skill segments; the housing affordability crisis affecting cities from London to Lagos; gendered care burdens; and discrimination by race, caste, and ethnicity. The Sustainable Development Goals adopted in 2015 commit states to reducing inequality within and among countries (SDG 10), but the 2024 UN SDG progress report found this goal sharply off-track. Policy debates concern the relative roles of universal social protection, progressive taxation, minimum wages, public investment in early childhood and health, and targeted programs such as conditional cash transfers — pioneered in Brazil (Bolsa Família) and Mexico (Progresa/Oportunidades) and now adopted in over sixty countries.

Key players

Political Disparities and Unequal Representation

Political disparities refer to systematic differences in who participates, who is represented, and whose preferences shape policy. A substantial body of empirical work — notably Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page's 2014 study of U.S. policymaking — has shown that the preferences of high-income citizens predict policy outcomes far more reliably than those of middle- or low-income citizens. Similar patterns have been documented in European democracies by Larry Bartels, Lea Elsässer, and others. These disparities are reproduced through several mechanisms: campaign finance and lobbying systems that privilege organized money; gerrymandering and malapportionment; voter-identification and registration rules that depress turnout among lower-income and minority citizens; and the underrepresentation of women, ethnic minorities, working-class candidates, and young people in legislatures. The Inter-Parliamentary Union reports that women still hold only around a quarter of parliamentary seats worldwide, and progress has slowed since 2020. Digital platforms have introduced new asymmetries — micro-targeted advertising, algorithmic amplification, and foreign interference — addressed unevenly by the EU's Digital Services Act (2022) and a patchwork of national regulations. Debates focus on proportional electoral systems, ranked-choice voting, independent redistricting, public campaign financing, gender quotas, and lowering the voting age.

Key players

Wealth Concentration and the Return of Patrimonial Capital

Wealth concentration — the share of national or global assets held by the top fractions of the distribution — is now substantially higher than income concentration in nearly every major economy. The World Inequality Report 2022 estimated that the global top 1% owns roughly 38% of all wealth, while the bottom 50% owns about 2%. Piketty's central thesis, that when the after-tax return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth (r > g) wealth concentrates over time, has been broadly corroborated by subsequent research using tax-administrative data. Key mechanisms include the rising share of inherited wealth (now approaching pre-1914 levels in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom), the appreciation of urban real estate and equity portfolios, the use of offshore financial centers documented by the Panama and Pandora Papers, and the under-taxation of capital gains relative to labor income. Gabriel Zucman estimates that roughly 10% of global GDP is held in tax havens, with the figure exceeding 50% for some Gulf and Latin American economies. The 2021 OECD/G20 agreement on a 15% global minimum corporate tax, the EU's beneficial-ownership registers, and Brazil's 2024 G20 proposal for a 2% minimum tax on billionaires represent the most concrete coordination efforts. Implementation remains uneven, and critics argue these floors are too low to materially affect concentration.

Key players

Power Concentration in States, Markets, and Platforms

Power concentration today operates across three reinforcing domains. Politically, executive aggrandizement has become the dominant mode of democratic backsliding: leaders elected through fair contests subsequently weaken courts, electoral commissions, and independent media, as documented in Hungary, Turkey, India, El Salvador, and Tunisia. Constitutional changes extending term limits or expanding presidential powers have proceeded in several states, while emergency powers introduced during COVID-19 were not always rolled back. Economically, market concentration has risen in many sectors. The IMF and OECD have documented increasing markups and falling labor shares in advanced economies, while a small number of firms dominate global markets in cloud computing, search, social media, semiconductors, agrochemicals, and aviation. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the European Commission's Directorate-General for Competition, and China's State Administration for Market Regulation have all pursued landmark antitrust cases since 2020. Technologically, a handful of platforms — Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, ByteDance, and Tencent — control much of the world's digital infrastructure, advertising markets, and increasingly the foundation models underpinning generative AI. The EU's Digital Markets Act (2022), AI Act (2024), and proposals for interoperability and structural separation represent the most developed regulatory frameworks. The convergence of political, economic, and informational power raises classical questions of pluralism that animate this committee's debate.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for V Conference “Democracy and Inequalities”.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis 2026

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis

Delimitation Based on 2011 Census

Supreme Court Upholds Election Commission Dis

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

The Power-Interest Grid

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Conflict Resolution

Argentina September 2026

By committee

Frequently asked questions

V Conference “Democracy and Inequalities”

Sep 17–18, 2026José C. Paz, ArgentinaIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
The State of Democracy in the Twenty-First Century · Global Inequalities in the Twenty-First Century · Democracy and Development in Latin America · The Reordering of the Global Order · Socioeconomic Disparities and Inclusive Growth · Political Disparities and Unequal Representation · Wealth Concentration and the Return of Patrimonial Capital · Power Concentration in States, Markets, and Platforms

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 3 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Argentina

Role in topic

Brazil

BRA faces significant challenges in reconciling its democratic structures with deep-seated social and economic inequalities, making it a key country for comparative analysis.

Role in topic

Mexico

Role in topic

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

The State of Democracy in the Twenty-First Century

Key players

Global Inequalities in the Twenty-First Century

Key players

Democracy and Development in Latin America

Key players

The Reordering of the Global Order

Key players

Socioeconomic Disparities and Inclusive Growth

Key players

Political Disparities and Unequal Representation

Key players

Wealth Concentration and the Return of Patrimonial Capital

Key players

Power Concentration in States, Markets, and Platforms

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for V Conference “Democracy and Inequalities”.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis 2026

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis

Delimitation Based on 2011 Census

Supreme Court Upholds Election Commission Dis

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

The Power-Interest Grid

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Conflict Resolution

Argentina September 2026

By committee

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

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Frequently asked questions

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

Seguridad y defensa en la era de la virtualidad

International Conference on Democracy, Political Change, and Gender Studies (ICDPCGS-2026)

I Congreso de Relaciones Internacionales del Litoral

UPORFA XXVI International Congress 2026

XXXVII Congreso Argentino de Derecho Internacional

XXVIII Congreso REDCOM 2026

Frequently asked questions