Pandemic accountability in defective democracies

The fundamental role of democracy is to ensure people’s evaluation of the performance of politicians and political institutions can be enacted via elections. This mechanism ensures that citizens’ views and interests are properly represented in the democratic process. Holding governmental parties electorally accountable is especially important for countries like Hungary and Poland since recent decisions made by Orbán’s and Kaczynski’s governments lead to the politicization of key institutions (Constitutional Tribunal/Court, the judicial system or the parliament itself), which together with puppet presidents of various public bodies have impaired the functioning of horizontal accountability. The impairment of accountability in both Hungary and Poland has been only reinforced by the sudden outbreak of the pandemic. The quickly introduced restrictive measures largely limited one’s freedoms, yet were readily accepted amidst fears of the spread of virus, people endorsing unprecedented policies of restriction as necessary to manage the health crisis. This initial “rallying around the flag” effect enhanced the power of governing parties in most countries, enabling adoption of further authoritarian measures (Guasti 2020, Levine 2020, Weiffen 2020, Changotra et al. 2020). In Poland, government adopted a new law on specific solutions related to the preventing, counteracting and combating COVID-19, which provided more power to the executive at the expense of checks and balances mechanism, while in Hungary the government opted for rule by decree and a prolonged emergency rule, disabling any opposition oversight or institutional control of policies adopted. Our paper investigates how pandemic crisis management that can often challenge democratic rule is evaluated in the two most criticized members of the EU – Poland and Hungary. The pandemic is said to contribute to democratic decay, yet we argue slightly differently: we claim (1) the first, immediate effect of the pandemic is to “rally around flag” but since (2) populist illiberal governments adopt authoritarian measures, (3) the ongoing pandemic can bring to the fore populists' failure/ineffective crisis management and thus (4) dissatisfaction can erode public support for the incumbents. Relying on data from public attitude surveys, we examine a number of possible sources of dissatisfaction under the pandemic: healthcare; economy; radical legal steps taken by authorities; and distorted/one-sided communication/false information. We expect citizens dissatisfied with the governing party’s performance in the pandemic should be willing to punish the “guilty” party withdrawing support. Since people evaluate their favorite party in government more positively than non-liked parties, we examine attitudes on the pandemic and its management together with partisanship to assess its role in determining support for the incumbent governments in extraordinary circumstances.