Democracy after Covid: Challenges in Europe and Beyond

This book, one of the first of its kind, explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on modern Western democracies from a comparative constitutional law and policy perspective. Through 11 scholarly contributions, it tackles cutting-edge topics for the liberal state, such as emergency legislation, judicial scrutiny of COVID-19 measures, parliamentarism and executive decision-making during the pandemic. The book examines these topics both from a microscopic national constitutional angle, with a focus on European states, and from a macroscopic regional and comparative angle, on par with the American example. The COVID-19 pandemic is thus treated as an international state of emergency that has enabled far-reaching restrictions on essential human rights, such as freedom of movement, freedom of religion or even major political rights, while giving rise to the ‘administrative state.' This edited volume explores each of these pressing themes in this exceptional context and evaluates different liberal states' responses to the pandemic. Were these responses reasonable, effective and democratic? Or is the COVID-19 pandemic just the beginning of a new era of global democratic backsliding? How can liberal democracies manage similar crises in future? What lessons have we learned? The institutional knowledge gained turns out to be the key for the future of the rule of law. © The Editor(s) (ifapplicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Populism and Contemporary Democracy in Europe: Old Problems and New Challenges

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the impact of populism on the European democratic polity. In the last two decades, European democracies have come under strain amid growing populism. By asserting the superiority of the majority over the law, of direct democracy over representation, and claiming the necessity to defend national sovereignty against foreign interferences, the populist conception of democracy is in stark contrast with the longstanding Western notion of liberal democracy. This volume investigates populist attempts to radically change what Bobbio called the "rules of the game" of democracy from an eminently legal perspective. Weaving together normative and empirical analysis, the contributions focus on the institutions that have suffered the most from the rise of populism as well as those that have better resisted the populist tide. Special attention will be paid to the Venice Commission's opinions and documents, as they represent the best European standards to evaluate the extent to which populism deviates from constitutional democracy requirements. The book also considers the responses of European States to the explosion of the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic has indeed been an accelerator of known and studied trends in most constitutional systems, such as the concentration of powers in the executive hands and the consequential loss of parliament's centrality. Various forms of populism across Europe have thus found an ideal breeding ground to implement their agenda of granting the executive broad regulatory and decision-making powers while loosening parliamentary and judicial checks. Against this backdrop, the book analyses how European democracies should adapt to the challenges posed by the pandemic, as this reflection can help respond to populist threats and propose a way forward for liberal democracy. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

The Incumbency Advantage during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Examining the 2020 Polish Presidential Election

This article analyzes how the 2020 Polish Presidential election was affected by the recent COVID-19 pandemic in the context of global democratic backsliding. Specifically, this article examines how the incumbency advantage of President Andrzej Duda was bolstered during the pandemic by the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS). Although PiS was unable to carry out every planned electoral manipulation, the party nonetheless helped Duda secure a second term in office in a historically close election. On the one hand, this article illustrates that while many of the tactics undertaken by PiS were within the limits of the letter of the law, its actions still undermined the spirit of Polish democracy. On the other hand, this article also contributes to the literature on democratic backsliding by underscoring the fact that the election in Poland was free and fair, which makes this regime qualitatively different from other cases in the region.

Recovering from the Unprecedented Backsliding in Immunization Coverage: Learnings from Country Programming in Five Countries through the Past Two Years of COVID-19 Pandemic Disruptions.

Between 2020 and 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic severely strained health systems across countries, leaving millions without access to essential healthcare services. Immunization programs experienced a 'double burden' of challenges: initial pandemic-related lockdowns disrupted access to routine immunization services, while subsequent COVID-19 vaccination efforts shifted often limited resources away from routine services. The latest World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) estimates suggest that 25 million children did not receive routine vaccinations in 2021, six million more than in 2019 and the highest number witnessed in nearly two decades. Recovering from this sobering setback requires a united push on several fronts. Intensifying the catch-up of routine immunization services is critical to reach children left behind during the pandemic and bridge large immunity gaps in countries. At the same time, we must strengthen the resilience of immunization systems to withstand future pandemics if we hope to achieve the goals of Immunization Agenda 2030 to ensure vaccinations are available for everyone, everywhere by 2030. In this article, leveraging the key actions for sustainable global immunization progress as a framework, we spotlight examples of strategies used by five countries-Cambodia, Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda-who have exhibited exemplar performance in strengthening routine immunization programs and restored lost coverage levels in the last two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. The contents of this article will be helpful for countries seeking to maintain, restore, and strengthen their immunization services and catch up missed children in the context of pandemic recovery and to direct their focus toward building back a better resilience of their immunization systems to respond more rapidly and effectively, despite new and emerging challenges.

Interest Group Strategic Responses to Democratic Backsliding

In this article, we offer insights into the plurality of interest groups' strategic responses to the socially, politically, and economically transformative phenomenon of democratic backsliding. For the purpose of the article, the term "ideational plurality” has been coined to refer to a plurality of interest groups' ideas leading their activities in general and their choice of strategies concerning the government in particular (attitudinal and behavioural aspects). Two policy fields and two types of interest groups engaged in an institutionalised social partnership—advocacy NGOs (operating in the environmental policy field) and economic groups (trade unions)—are studied comparatively in Slovenia using a mixed‐methods approach. The key findings are that strategic responses to democratic backsliding vary between environmental NGOs and trade unions, as do their ideational plurality, and that environmental NGOs' ideational plurality damages their potential to struggle against democratic backsliding. In contrast, trade unions' ideational homogeneity enables them to jointly struggle against governmental destruction of one significant segment of democratic order (institutions of social partnership) without demanding that the government step down for misusing the Covid‐19 pandemic to establish a system of governance that resonates with Viktor Orbán's ideas of illiberal democracy.

Democratic backsliding in illiberal Singapore

Singapore is a well-known illiberal democracy, ruled by one party, the People's Action Party (PAP), uninterruptedly since 1959. The rise of disinformation, the leadership succession crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic have posed challenges to the ruling party's technocratic, 'soft-authoritarian' governance style. Is it business as usual in Singapore? Or has its democracy backslid like its regional neighbours? Drawing on an established index of accountability and V-Dem's democratic indicators, our study investigates whether democratic institutions in hybrid regimes such as Singapore have changed. We find that mechanisms of diagonal accountability related to media and civil society have declined. Vertical and horizontal accountability remains weak as expected in a hybrid regime such as Singapore. The PAP government has returned to relying on the law as a 'fist in velvet glove' to muzzle dissent and constrain information that may last post pandemic.

Pandemic power grab

Is Covid-19 undermining European democracies? Recent scholarship overlooks the fact that most pandemic-related erosions of democracy can be attributed to illiberal inertia long in place before 2019. Did the democratic decay occur during the pandemic or due to the pandemic? We analyse the extent to which pandemic power grabs succeeded and failed in Europe with special attention to the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. The executive power of the purse was an opportunity to abuse state resources. Governments that engage in the "pandemic heist" with impunity can be directly linked to a power grab due to the pandemic.

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Model of Governance and Democracy in Poland

Almost the whole of 2020 was a year of governance by pandemic measures. Many governments, in these extraordinary times, formally introduced states of emergency. One exception in this regard is Poland. Although it used, in the second and third quarter of 2020, one of the most restrictive forms of lockdown, the government did not decide on the declaration of a state of emergency. At the same time, the scope of implemented regulations was extensive. This article presents a qualitative research on the instruments used by the Polish government in the year 2020 to deal with the pandemic. The analysis allows us to conclude that the so called "anti-crisis shields" were used to a large extent as an instrument of governance of the country, not a tool to prevent a pandemic. At least part of the restrictions adopted in Poland was beyond the need and unrelated to fighting the pandemic. However, these steps are leading to further deterioration of the state of democracy. The analysis of the tools used by the Polish government is based on the framework on the democratic backsliding and autocratization as well as the V-dem concept of "autocratization by decree", which can be also applied to the COVID-19 situation.

The Incumbency Advantage during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Examining the 2020 Polish Presidential Election

This article analyzes how the 2020 Polish Presidential election was affected by the recent COVID-19 pandemic in the context of global democratic backsliding. Specifically, this article examines how the incumbency advantage of President Andrzej Duda was bolstered during the pandemic by the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS). Although PiS was unable to carry out every planned electoral manipulation, the party nonetheless helped Duda secure a second term in office in a historically close election. On the one hand, this article illustrates that while many of the tactics undertaken by PiS were within the limits of the letter of the law, its actions still undermined the spirit of Polish democracy. On the other hand, this article also contributes to the literature on democratic backsliding by underscoring the fact that the election in Poland was free and fair, which makes this regime qualitatively different from other cases in the region. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of East European Politics & Societies is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

COVID-19 and erosion of democracy.

The main research question of this study is about the drivers of democracy backsliding during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a special focus on the rule of law and the state of democracy just before the shock. There is growing interest in the political implications of the coronavirus pandemic, debating mostly the misuse of emergencies and violations of various norms by governments; however the links between the current democracy erosion with institutional environment remain unclear. We use a novel global dataset covering the period of the first two waves of the pandemic (January-December 2020), and apply various econometric and machine learning tools to identify institutional, economic and social factors influencing democracy. Our results are of scientific and practical importance and imply that the stronger the rule of law and the higher the level of democracy, the lower the risk of democracy backsliding in the face of the pandemic.