Pandemic Policy & Electoral Support in Eastern Europe & Latin America

Session Submission Type: Virtual Full Paper Panel

Session Description

How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected political behavior at different levels of government? Scholarship on personal experience of crisis and its effects on electoral support suggest the possibility of both rallying effects around and crisis-penalties against incumbents at different levels of government. There is some evidence that local politicians are more secure in times of crisis as they can blame national governments for policy missteps avoiding a penalty. Yet, extreme crises are also known to catalyze national unity, which can rally support for incumbent governments at the national level. Moreover, how politicians manage and respond to such crises is not independent of how they view or predict levels of public support. Politicians at the local level may have more freedom to implement controversial policies if they are highly popular or operate in a closed local market where challengers would need to break through near impenetrable clientelist networks. But they may also decide to avoid such policies if local competition is high and the national government is locally unpopular. And national governments may choose to either blame local governments when they are unwilling to risk their own popularity, or, if they are certain in national unity/their popularity, they might be more willing to act decisively, implementing policy measures that are unpopular and controversial. This calculus and feedback loop might also depend on how centralized state power is.

When it comes to public health crises, we struggle to understand what mechanisms are at play at the local versus the national level. We know of little work that tackles the above puzzles comparing and contrasting local and national dynamics together. Not least, we know of no recent work that attempts to compare these phenomena across different geographical contexts in eastern Europe and Latin America – where democracies are fragile and autocracies resilient. Meeting this call, the papers on this panel comparatively assesses the role of the COVID 19 public health crises on electoral responses at the local and national level while also examining whether and how politicians respond to potential rally and penalty effects.

We first explore the relationship between the lived experience of the COVID-19 pandemic at the local and national level. Zavadskaya and Sokolov first tackle this question in the case of Russia. Employing recently collected panel data, they explore the two main mechanisms that shape the dynamics of political support and political trust in times of a pandemic. They find that a short-term rallying effect following the exogenous shock of the first phase of the pandemic is followed by ‘hyper-accountability’ of the national government with subsequent punishment. Onuch, Hale, Kulyk, and Sasse, using original two wave cross-sectional data (2020) collected by the authors in Ukraine, find that while there is evidence that individual level uncertainty, anxiety, and fear around the pandemic result in a fragile rally effect shoring up support for the national government and specifically the President, one simultaneously observes a significant incumbent covid penalty in local elections. Combining their Ukraine findings with data from Argentina (2020/2021), they test their findings to see if state centralisation plays a role and whether the covid rally-penalty dynamic is inverted and favours subnational government. Behrend and Simpson build on this work by exploring the specificities of the variation in covid-pandemic response of four local governments in Argentina. This work provides qualitative insight into how and why pollical responses vary at the local level vis a vis national responses. Combining electoral support and policy management during a health pandemic, Beltran, employing the cases of Mexico and Brazil, looks specifically at how politicians more directly decide to implement elections in the context of pandemic and what strategies they use to in order to shore up support and avoid a COVID pandemic penalty.

A comparative approach is central to theoretical, methodological and empirical innovation in political science. The authors have been asked to consider and place their cases in comparative perspective both at the inter-regional and intra-regional levels.

This panel resonates well with APSA’s 2021 theme of “Promoting Pluralism” as our panel promotes the voices of scholars based on four continents, has a good gender and seniority balance, and moreover combines research employing different data, conceptual and methodological perspectives in two regions and thus, “push[es] us away from silos” celebrating “a wide array of scholars, methods, methodologies and approaches.” Our panel will engage diverse audiences, across subfields and regions of interest. Our discussants and chair each have their own projects on democracy and covid and thus bring further geographic pluralism spanning the Post-Soviet space, western Europe, and North America.

Sub Unit

• Division 13: Politics of Communist and Former Communist Countries

Individual Presentations

• Electoral Effects of COVID-19 on Incumbents at Local and National levels - Olga Onuch, University of Manchester; Henry E. Hale, George Washington University; Gwendolyn Sasse, Humboldt University Berlin

• Subnational Response to the COVID Pandemic in Argentina - Jacqueline Behrend, Universidad Nacional de San Martin; Ximena Simpson, Universidad Nacional de San Martin

• COVID-19 and Political Support in Russia: Evidence from an Online Panel Survey - Margarita Zavadskaya, University of Helsinki

• Neoliberalization from the Monarchy to the COVID-19 Crisis in Hungary - Attila Antal, Eötvös Loránd University

Chair

• Guy Grossman University of Pennsylvania

Discussants

• Francesc Amat University of Barcelona, Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes 585, Q0818001J, 08007 Barcelona

• Graeme Robertson