My mother was born behind the Iron Curtain in Prague, Czechoslovakia. The communist government stole her family’s belongings and forced them to work demanding physical labor jobs. Wishing for a better life, her family illegally fled across the border and immigrated to America in 1968. The communist government eventually fell in 1989 due to the Velvet Revolution, an anti-communist protest fueled by an economic downturn. In June 1990, Czechoslovakia’s first democratic elections established a new government that transformed the economy by moving company ownership from the state to private entities. While learning about this historical event at the core of my family story, I was drawn in by the dynamic relationship between economic trends and political stability: an economic depression caused an upheaval of the governmental system, ultimately leading to a new political system and administrative economic policy transition. This sparked a question: how are political stability and economic trends correlated beyond this seemingly insignificant revolution, and how could this relationship be quantified?

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• Economics
• Political Science