Critical Junctures, Ideological Continuity and Change in Western Europe: Comparing the Pandemic and the Global Financial Crises

Abstract

ABSTRACT Research focusing on the Covid-19 crisis politics treats ideology mostly as an independent or intervening variable, lacking attention to the effects of the pandemic on ideological conflict and the configurations between ideas and actors and is ambiguous about its impact. To address these deficiencies, we provide an assessment of ideological change by combining accounts of political development and theories of hegemony and apply the resulting framework through a comparative history of “crisis” in Western Europe, juxtaposing the pandemic with the 2008 financial crisis. We argue that the pandemic’s ideological impact entails signs of both continuity and change, across both ideational and institutional dynamics, more change than the financial crisis, but not reaching the threshold of “a critical juncture” and thus amounts to a partial ideological reconfiguration. The analysis has implications for the Covid-19 pandemic legacy, the study of crises and the ideological terrain in the current context.