The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on democratic erosion

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has put effective governance to the test all over the world. Governments were forced to manage an unprecedented crisis and, at the same time, cope with the political challenges that the unorthodox measures had entailed. Governments and authorities applied a great variety of responses which will be the focus of investigations by scholars of political science in the upcoming years. Furthermore, the Covid-19 pandemic had a great impact on the simultaneous processes of democratic backsliding and its counter-movements. This panel intends to contribute to the study of this topic focusing on the questions: how governments led by populist parties (or mainstream parties applying populist tools) reacted to the pandemic and how their measures influenced democratic erosion and resilience. The link between political populism and democratic erosion has recently been at the forefront of extensive scholarly analysis. Political scientists have explored both the tide of democratic backsliding and the counter-tide of democratic resilience – two simultaneous and interacting processes that define contemporary politics. The eruption of the Covid-19 pandemic presented a novel type of political crisis the impact of which on the processes influencing the status of democratization is one of the most exciting political phenomena to be investigated. This panel intends to be among the first opportunities where this impact will be analysed within the populist context. The papers in this panel will cover three countries: Sweden, which is considered an established democracy, and Hungary and Turkey where democratic erosion has reached profound but different levels. The selection of cases intends to provide a unique opportunity for the comparison of the processes of democratic backsliding in countries with diverse political and cultural backgrounds and a varying degree of erosion. The analysis of the Swedish context will be approached in the tradition of normative behavior, where claims of democracy and national superiority intertwine as the dominant social imaginary. Special attention will be given to the populist “us vs. them” dichotomy within the pandemic discourse involving migrant minorities. The manifestation of this rhetorical dichotomy will also be in the center of one of the papers that covers Hungary. This paper will empirically investigate the effectiveness of the populist narrative during the pandemic and present evidence of how populism may fuel anti-science public sentiments, a key component of democratic erosion. The second paper on Hungary will apply the anti-science perspective highlighting the complicated and uneven relationship between right-wing populism and pseudoscientific conspiracy theories. The paper covering Turkey presents an empirical analysis of evidence about how counter-scientific discourses supported through right-wing political rhetoric help produce a culture of resistance to science. It will explore how the development of counter knowledge served as a catalyser of producing and disseminating public sentiments on populist discourses of common identity-creation.

Title	Details
Coronavirus as a source of Eurosceptic narratives: Evidence from Central Eastern Europe	View Paper Details
Irrationality, conspiracy theories and anti-science movements – Anti-vaccine mobilisation during COVID-19 pandemic in Turkey	View Paper Details
Limits of pandemic policy critique: unveiling the shades of Swedish democracy	View Paper Details
Covid-skepticism, Pseudoscience and the populist radical right: a complicated relationship	View Paper Details
Enemies everywhere: the limits of the populist anti-elitist narrative during the Covid-19 pandemic. The case of Hungary	View Paper Details