Introduced by Veronica Anghel, G&O 'Robert Elgie' Editorial Fellow.

March 11, 2023 marks three years since the World Health Organisation declared the COVID-19 health crisis a pandemic. In this period, citizens, states and supranational structures were affected by COVID-19 related policies in a myriad of ways. Political scientists in all subfields of research investigated how and why. Their efforts to understand the effects of the pandemic are also important for policy-makers who aim to predict the political effects of imminent future epidemics.  Such studies are crucial to continuously update our understanding of how institutions and societies react to crisis and how elites might use moments of disruption to advance their political agendas. Not least, the intensive study of COVID-19 serves to monitor alterations of countries’ democratic consolidation.

Government & Opposition published numerous studies on the effects of COVID-19. Many of these studies showed that populist leaders tried to use the pandemic opportunistically to increase their powers and accentuated the populist, nativist and authoritarian tendencies that characterize their parties. But their bid for more electoral support by appealing to citizens’ illiberal preferences were not usually successful.

In a paper analyzing the trajectory of the radical-right National Rally, Caterina Froio illustrates how the use of nativist, authoritarian and populist tropes did not pay off during the pandemic in France. The same was true for the Alternative for Germany (AfD). The far-right party positioned itself as a critic of quarantine measures and all other government policies. Pola Lehmann and Lisa Zehnter claim that this populist stance did not have any positive effect on support for the AfD.  Similarly, Agnes Batory shows that while Hungary’s Fidesz leaders augmented their illiberal stances, they were more successful in aggrandizing their power through the alteration of institutions than by increasing popular support. Lisa Zanotti and Stuart James Turnbull-Dugarte studied the politics of radical-right Vox in Spain and found that radical right Spanish party VOX also intensified its extremism, but stagnated rather than acquiring more popular support then it had to begin with. Andrea L.P. Piro points out how, collectively, the Italian populist radical right only broke even during the first year of COVID-19.

In the United States, President Donald Trump and the Republican Party looked for ways to minimize the pandemic's economic effects and its potential political fallout, and downplayed the seriousness of the health threat. Kenneth M. Roberts shows how that failure of governance cost the Trump administration electoral support. This administration preferred to stoke outgroup hostility and the externalization of blame. In an analysis of the rhetoric that Trump used on Twitter and in press briefs, Corina Lacatus and Gustav Meibauer find limited rhetorical adaptation to crisis and high degrees of continuity with previous right-wing populism. Other right-wing populist leaders showed a greater openness to adaptability.  Başak Taraktaş, Berk Esen and Suzan Uskudarli  show that while Trump used Twitter to praise himself and his policies, India’s PM Narendra Modi and UK’s PM Boris Johnson modified their crisis communication strategies and decide to employ Twitter to inform the public and deliver solidarity messages.

Democratic mechanisms of accountability and elite monitoring contributed to the limited success of far-right agendas through the pandemic. As Maritza Lozano, Michael Atkinson and Haizhen Mou demonstrate in their comparative study of Canada, the UK, New Zealand and Australia, countries that provided strong accountability before the pandemic maintained relatively high accountability standards during the crisis; weaker accountability mechanisms showed less resistance to the expanding power of the executive. As expected, the absence of accountability mechanisms and no commitment to transparency led authoritarian regimes to fare even worse. Drawing on the case of Turkey, Melis G. Laebens and Aykut Öztürk highlight how authoritarian institutions allow governments to sustain a gap between performance and reality, granting their leaders greater possibilities to claim policy success unfairly.

- Where not open access, the articles in this collection are available free of charge until the end of April 2023.