PDW Democracy and Entrepreneurship in Transition: Regimes, Risks, and Resilience
Session 20853
Sunday August 2nd 9:00 - 11:00
Philadelphia Marriott Downtown: Level 4: Franklin 7
Organisers:
David Audretsch, Indiana University
Diana Hechavarria, Babson College
Petra Moog, Zurich University of Applied Sciences
Steven Brieger, NEOMA Business School
Ben Spigel, Babson College
To sign up for a roundtable discussion, please register here by July 10th
The relationship between democracy and entrepreneurship represents a rapidly expanding yet theoretically fragmented area of inquiry. As democratic erosion, hybrid regimes, and authoritarian tendencies reshape political and economic landscapes worldwide, understanding how these processes affect entrepreneurial activity, and how entrepreneurs themselves influence democratic structures, has become an urgent scholarly and policy challenge. This PDW addresses the heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory findings in this emerging literature. While scholars propose that democratic governance supports entrepreneurship through freedom of thought, choice, and action, empirical evidence reveals that democracy both enables and constrains venturing depending on measurement approaches, contextual factors, and industry characteristics. These inconsistencies signal the need for greater conceptual clarity and methodological rigor. The workshop advances management knowledge across several dimensions. First, it deepens understanding of how political regime type shapes opportunity identification, risk-taking, financing, and innovation. Second, it examines the reverse relationship: how entrepreneurial activity reinforces or undermines democratic norms and civic engagement. Third, it addresses critical methodological challenges, including variation among democracy indices and entrepreneurship measures that produce divergent conclusions. Fourth, it explores how historical legacies, informal institutions, and path dependence shape contemporary entrepreneurial ecosystems. Finally, the workshop investigates patterns of inclusion and exclusion, examining whether democratization expands entrepreneurial access broadly or whether structural inequalities persist across regime types. By fostering interdisciplinary dialogue across political science, economics, sociology, and management, this workshop aims to strengthen theoretical integration and generate new research trajectories at a critical frontier of entrepreneurship scholarship.
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Ben Spigel
Assistant Professor
Babson College
Babson Park MA
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