Whither Democracy?
Overshadowed by widespread concerns about autocratization—the decline of democratic attributes world-wide, the emergent literature has been dominated by normative concerns, fallen short of advancing an explanatory model which is based on empirical evidence, to make sense of the divergent outcomes. While the proliferation of illiberal practices and the resultant backsliding in democracies has been a primary concern of the scholarly work on autocratization, the trajectory of hybrid regimes such as electoral authoritarianism that have further degenerated into autocracy has not been given equitable attention. We submit that there has been little appetite among democracies for trading rights and freedoms for public health, but Covid-19 has exposed the paradox of the pandemic in the sense that whilst autocrats whose inherent vulnerabilities in their capacity were laid bare by the spread of the disease have stepped up the repression in the name of public health protection, thereby strengthening the global trend towards autocratization with such power grabs.
The proposed study seeks to paint a nuanced portrait of how Covid-19 has shaped the electoral arena in general and whether the pandemic has sped up autocratization around the world. We intend to address the gap in the emergent literature with respect to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the spread of autocratization and democratic backsliding across the world since February 2020:
How regime types shaped the choices available to the leaders in response to the crisis?
How such choices were made and presented to various stakeholders of the regimes?
How did the public and the opposition forces respond and shape political contestation through civil society actions, electoral participation, non-violent protests, calls for boycott, and electoral violence?
The extent to which the elections and referendums in question served to consolidate or weaken the incumbents, and specifically how did the pandemic affect the electoral odds for the incumbents and their counterparts in the opposition?
To what extent the pandemic has fuelled anti-liberal populism and strengthened the movements at the expense of the anti-authoritarian parties and their leaders in the elections and referendums under investigation?
In response to the general observation that the global health crisis has propelled democratic backsliding and autocratization across the world, why, and how, democratic backsliding and autocratization were checked in some nations but not in others.