Understanding the Global Patrimonial Wave

• In Event: Pandemic Effects

Abstract

Over the past decade, there has been a marked decline in the number and quality of democracies around the world. Freedom House reports that overall levels of democracy have declined for 14 straight years; in 2019, countries suffering democratic setbacks outnumbered those experiencing gains by a two-to-one margin. During 2020, in the throes of the global COVID-19 pandemic, world leaders faced yet another set of grim prognoses—both for the defense of public health and for the preservation of economic stability. In countries where public trust in large-scale state bureaucracies was largely sustained through the crisis, the novel coronavirus was contained relatively successfully (though never perfectly) through two waves. By contrast, in countries ruled by self-aggrandizing men who attacked impersonal legal procedures and the state bureaucracies that enforced them, the pandemic continued to spread throughout the population at a faster rate. The question naturally arises: are these two phenomena—the global erosion of democracy and the generally embarrassing response of narcissistic male leaders around the world to COVID-19—causally linked?

We contend in this essay that there is indeed a connection between negative trends in global regime change and in global public health policy—but this link is far more complex and indirect than it has typically been portrayed in the literature to date. In fact, the simple dichotomy between “democracy” and “authoritarianism” which has guided much contemporary political analysis does not serve us well in understanding the comparative quality of global responses to the pandemic. In this essay we will argue that what matters most in explaining comparative regime responses to the pandemic is the degree to which countries—whether formally democratic or authoritarian—were governed by rulers who consider themselves the unique embodiment of the political community. Such leaders generate a regime type that the great German sociologist Max Weber termed patrimonialism. Understood in this light, the major trend in regime change over the past decade has been not simply a move away from democratic institutions to authoritarianism, but more precisely, a wave of patrimonialism spreading through autocratic and democratic regions alike. Unfortunately, patrimonial regimes, however attractive they may be to angry and skeptical electorates, are simply awful at managing any complex problem of modern governance--including pandemic response. And in the end, the damaging effects of patrimonial rule on modern state bureaucracies must inevitably undermine the integrity of the electoral procedures and constitutional frameworks upon which democratic governance depends.

Authors

• Stephen E. Hanson, College of William and Mary

• Jeffrey Kopstein, University of California, Irvine