Implications of Covid-19 Public Health Measures in Established Democracies

• In Event: Relevance, Quality, and Expedience: Political Science Responds to COVID-19: Comparing and Explaining Policy Reactions and Political Consequences

Abstract

This paper provides a new typology of how measures taken against Covid-19 relate to specific normative and legal priniciples of democracy and investigates their democratic implications in 30 established democracies. Governments across the world have implemented drastic public health measures aimed to limit infections with Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. While responses are far from uniform across countries, many of the measures taken clash with basic individual free- doms and human rights and in several cases have required declaring a state of emergency.
We present the results of an ongoing inter-disciplinary research project on the interactions be- tween the quality of a country’s democracy, and the public health measures against Covid-19 decided by its government. In contrast to much ongoing work, we do not perceive these respsonses as uni-dimensional and linearly related to the quality of democracy. We thus regard it as necessary to investigate how specific legal elements and procedures of the Covd-19 re- sponse relate to different dimensions and principles of liberal democracy. We therefore draw on comparative constitutional law to develop criteria for assessing Covid-19-related public health measures according to normative and legal principles of democracy. Second, we use these multi-dimensional criteria to categorize data that we are currently collecting to qualify the democratic implications for 30 established democracies. Making use of the data from the De- mocracy Barometer project (based at our institute), we explore systematic differences of poli- cies chosen across varieties of democratic regimes. Third, we test the hypothesis that backslid- ing democracies are more likely to opt for problematic public health measures, resulting in an acceleration of democratic backsliding in the context of the pandemic. Our findings do not only present a more encompassing picture of the difficult relationship between Covid-19 response and democratic quality. They also provide a framework useful to evaluate countries’ crisis re- sponses in the future.

Authors

• Tarik Abou-Chadi, University of Zurich

• Daniel Kubler, University of Zurich

• Lucas Leemann, University of Zurich

• Romale Lovelace

• Sarah Engler, University of Zurich

• Palmo Brunner, University of Zurich