Regime Types and the Real World of Oligarchy in the Shadow of COVID-19

• In Event: COVID-19 in Comparative Context

Abstract

In the early months of the COVID-19 outbreak, political scientists immediately argued that democratic countries deal better with pandemics than their authoritarian counterparts. This is in keeping with a general thrust within American political science of comparing democracies with authoritarian regimes, in order to demonstrate the superiority of the former across various indicators. Yet, with regards to COVID, democratic regimes have not performed noticeably better. Although there have been attempts to explain the poor performance of some democracies by way of illiberal populist rulers, emerging studies suggest that populists have generally fared no worse than their non-populist counterparts. This presents something of a puzzle: it seems like regime type ought to explain a lot in terms of pandemic response, yet we are not able to detect such a trend.

We argue that the inability to explain pandemic responses according to regime type reveals a more general shortcoming of how the categories of populism, democracy, and authoritarianism are deployed by political scientists. Almost sixty years ago, the political theorist C.B. Macpherson argued that continuities across regime types demonstrated that we lived in a “real world” of different kinds of democracy. We argue that that we currently live in a real world of oligarchy: the economic transformations of the past four decades have reshaped state capacity globally, resulting in a transfer of wealth and power, across regime types, away from working people to political and economic elites. While classifying regimes can help explain variations in COVID responses, we may be looking at the wrong categories. The terms populism, democracy, and authoritarianism can serve to obscure continuities across regime types and differences within them. The framework of varieties of oligarchy serves to correct this problem, bringing continuities and similarities across these regime types into sharp relief.

Looking at the real world of oligarchy in the shadow of COVID-19, we conduct a most different systems comparison across five national governments, spanning different regime types – China, Pakistan, Colombia, the US, and Canada – to examine (1) epidemic containment strategies and (2) economic stimulus and relief policies. The effective containment of the virus depended in part on the pursuit a basket of relatively well-known and effective techniques. Whether or not governments pursued such techniques is best explained, we argue, not by variation in regime type, but rather by variation in state capacity and how this intersects with the contextually specific drive of state and economic elites to preserve and, in some cases, enhance profits. In all cases, with the exception of China, the containment strategies of these regimes have protected the affluent at the expense of working people. Meanwhile, given the impact of the pandemic on economy, governments have spent an estimated US$12.5 trillion globally on stimulus and have undertaken additional relief measures to cushion the impacts of economic dislocation. The cases we examine represent a large portion of this unprecedented stimulus spending, and we demonstrate that despite variations in the relief measures directed toward working people, as well as in overall stimulus measures pursued, the net effect of economic policies in all cases has been an immense transfer of wealth from public to private hands.

We thus conclude that in all these cases, even among the more effective responders, the systematic prioritization of capital and the affluent at the expense of labor revealed the shared oligarchic character of these states and informed the limitations of their responses to the pandemic. The insight, we think, generalizes. While recognizing that the categories of democracy, populism, or authoritarianism can indicate important differences among regimes, we contend that approaching such regimes as varieties, and various degrees, of oligarchy renders legible otherwise obscured aspects of the contemporary political-economic condition.

Authors

• Noaman G Ali, Lahore University of Management Sciences

• Luke Melchiorre, Universidad de los Andes