COVID-19 and Democracy

Abstract

In line with the framework proposed in the introduction to this volume, this chapter provides a tentative assessment of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the responses of national governments on the democratic quality of political institutions and processes in political systems worldwide and in Asia-Oceania. The chapter combines OLS regression estimating the effects of government responses on democratic qualities in 144 countries worldwide with more in-depth qualitative comparison of the Asia-Oceania countries. The cross-regional analysis shows that pre-COVID-19 levels of democracy are good predicators for violations of democratic standards during the pandemic. As expected, the relationship between pre-pandemic democracy levels and pandemic violations of democratic standards is nonlinear. The decline of democratic quality during the pandemic is relatively minor in most countries, but there is a number of cases whose political institutions and processes registered important losses in democratic quality. Related to this, there is no uniform trend of democratic decline in the pandemic. Rather, the pandemic is playing into domestic political processes that were already occurring before the pandemic, which have contributed in different ways to destabilize fragile democratic institutions or harden authoritarian structures.