Where is the Real Conspiracy? Covid and Post-Communist Democratic Decay

• In Event: Government and Citizen Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Back in April, it looked like the biggest Covid-related threat to democracy was executive aggrandizement. The focus on executive behavior, however, may lead us to overlook Covid effects on other building blocs of democratic governance—an institutionalized party system, democracy-sustaining popular attitudes, and–Eastern Europe’s perennial chimera– clean government. We argue that the rapid rise of Covid-related misinformation and conspiracy theories, has adversely affected all three elements and jeopardize both democratic development in Eastern Europe and EU’s internal coherence. We hypothesize that in countries suffering from state capture, voters have a harder time differentiating between the ``true'' political conspiracy that enables private interests to control the state and conspiracies without empirical basis, such as Covid denialism, world government, or political correctness tyrannical plot. We use a February 2021 original survey from Bulgaria and a GLOBSEC 2020 cross-national survey to explore this hypothesis. Finally, we draw some theoretical implications of the empirical evidence for assessing the nature of democratic backsliding in Eastern Europe. We call for more research on voters’ political knowledge as a factor in explaining backsliding processes.

Authors

• Nikolay V. Marinov, University of Houston

• Maria Popova, McGill University