Populists and the Pandemic: How Populists Around the World Respond to COVID-19

• In Event: COVID-19 in Comparative Context

Abstract

This contribution examines, compares, and analyzes the responses of populist political leaders and parties to the COVID-19 pandemic in 23 countries in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa. The pandemic is a common exogenous shock hitting countries across a world in which democracy has been stagnant or in retreat and populists have been ascending. This shock is one that, in some ways, seems to favor the objectives of at least some populists, since a pandemic has the potential to strengthen politically and socially regressive forces, increase individual anxiety and collective malaise, negatively affect the overall mood of the country, contribute to greater societal schisms, and perhaps entail an increased acceptance of authoritarianism. On the other hand, a successful response to the pandemic requires decisive state action, reliance on scientific expertise and data, and careful consideration of policy options at odds with populists’ rhetoric and agendas. The pandemic thus represents both challenge and opportunity for populists.

Our focus is on populists’ general attitudes, rhetoric, mobilization repertoires, and policy proposals regarding the pandemic. The main goals are, first, to investigate and compare populists’ reactions to the same externally triggered crisis, which promises to shed important new light on the relationship between populism and crisis – and by extension on the phenomenon of populism itself; second, to explain variation in populist responses by identifying the structural, institutional, and political factors that mediate their reactions; and, third, to consider how populists’ political fortunes are affected by the crisis itself, as well as their own crisis politics.

Rather than focus on the populist “usual suspects” – and to avoid drawing misleading conclusions from a small number of highly publicized examples of failed populist pandemic responses in places like Brazil and the U.S. – our analysis casts a wider net and takes advantage of substantial variation across cases. Some countries feature populist parties, others personalistic populist leaders. Some are democracies, others autocracies. Some populists are left-wing and inclusionary, others right-wing and exclusionary. This variation allows for consideration of different factors that may systematically affect or mediate populist responses to the pandemic. To capture shifts in populists’ strategies over the course of the pandemic, we track their reactions from spring 2020 through the first half of 2021.

The data that enables this ambitious agenda is based on an expert survey with country specialists (who have already agreed to provide the relevant information). This will be supplemented with additional data from V-Dem, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and other sources. We use Qualitative Comparative Analysis to identify similarities and differences between cases, isolate common variables and analytical categories used to explain them, and emphasize the commonalities and differences in populists’ responses to the pandemic. Ultimately, we will propose a general model of populist responses to the pandemic; explore its dimensions as they relate to public policy, public opinion, elite behavior and rhetoric; and draw out its implications for democratic governance and liberal-democratic institutions.

Authors

• Nils Ringe, University of Wisconsin, Madison

• Lucio R. Renno