A cross-institutional exploratory investigation of COVID-19 spread: formal vs. informal institutions

We investigate the effect of culture on COVID-19 spread using a sample of 67 countries over the first 10 months of the pandemic. We find that individualistic countries have higher number of COVID-19 cases, an effect that is independent from formal institutions. A two-ways interaction effects, however, between formal institutions and individualism, shows that effective political institutions, sound governance, and better economic conditions reduce the effect on individualism on CVODI-19 spread. Our findings provide evidence that are useful not only for explaining differences in COVID-19 spread between countries but can also enable policymakers and organizations to understand what generally determines individuals' compliance with formal rules and regulations.

Chilean institutional policies and multi-level agents: Challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic and carbon footprint

Introduction: As a result of the increasing number of multilateral agreements that Chile has signed, different sectors of consumption have become sources of emissions. In this context attempts to implement guidelines to address this issue have been made. Nevertheless, international policies such as sustainable development goals (SDG) 11–12 often generate dissonance in national and local administrations and have been approached by different instruments to reduce the effects of emissions, mostly focused on the private industrial sector. Methods: This article focuses on four of the most polluted cities in south-central Chile (Coronel, Temuco, Valdivia, and Osorno). Key agents (ministries, regional government, municipalities, and civil society) from three levels of policy development were selected at three scales (national, regional, and local) and interviewed considering three thematic axes: knowledge of carbon footprint areas (housing, heating, food, mobility, and energy), institutional governance, and adaptive changes due to COVID-19. Results: The results show that in Chile, there is a multiscale climate governance led by the Ministry of the Environment (national level), followed by the regional and local levels. Citizens are then left with few capacities, which is negatively viewed. In relation to the carbon footprint and COVID-19, it can be observed that the topic of energy was more addressed at the national and regional levels. Food and energy, followed by heating and then mobility were addressed at the communal level and in civil society. Discussion: Decision-making strategies and policies were discussed in this paper. Copyright © 2023 Bergamini, Ojeda, Gutiérrez, Salazar and Curillán.

The ‘presidential accordion' in times of crisis: is it still well tuned?

The article analyses the role of the President of the Italian Republic (PoR) as it relates to the process of government formation during the political, economic, and pandemic crises of the last three legislatures. The analysis focuses on the political actions of Giorgio Napolitano and Sergio Mattarella, the two Presidents of the Republic elected (and re-elected) as heads of state during those crises. To explain how the PoR operates when forming a government, the article examines the conditions allowing the functioning of the ‘presidential accordion', i.e. the expansion and contraction of the presidential powers in the process of government formation. The presidential accordion hypothesis has been supported by many empirical studies focussing on the role of the PoR in the Italian parliamentary system. The aim of this study is further empirically to test the hypothesis in order to verify whether profound exogenous crises, such as recent economic and pandemic crises, can be considered as independent or intervening variables strengthening or weakening the PoR in the Italian political system. ©, The Founding Editors, Contemporary Italian Politics.

Misinformation and the Paradox of Trust during the covid-19 pandemic in the U.S.: pathways to Risk perception and compliance behaviors

As declared "infodemic” by the World Health Organization, the proliferation of Covid-19 misinformation has posed a significant challenge to public health efforts to tackle the pandemic. Despite initial evidence on the association between misinformation and behavior, researchers have yet to fully identify intervening variables to account for the behavioral effects of Covid-19 misinformation. To address this question, this study aims to examine whether and how consuming misinformation would predict public trust in health and political institutions, and in turn, shape risk perception and adherence to preventive behaviors. We conducted a web-based survey using a nationally representative sample of 1,400 U.S. adults in October 2020. We found that Covid-19 misinformation exposure was linked to lower trust in public health experts but higher trust in government, which led to a decrease in the perceived severity of Covid-19 and less compliance with public health guidance. Our findings uncover the complex social and psychological processes by which misinformation consumption undermines public health efforts during the pandemic crisis. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

How Anti-Social Personality Traits and Anti-Establishment Views Promote Beliefs in Election Fraud, QAnon, and COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation

Conspiracy theories and misinformation (CTM) became a salient feature of the Trump era. However, traditional explanations of political attitudes and behaviors inadequately account for beliefs in CTM or the deleterious behaviors they are associated with. Here, we integrate disparate literatures to explain beliefs in CTM regarding COVID-19, QAnon, and voter fraud. We aim to provide a more holistic accounting, and to determine which political, psychological, and social factors are most associated with such beliefs. Using a unique national survey, we find that anti-social personality traits, anti-establishment orientations, and support for Donald Trump are more strongly related to beliefs in CTM than traditional left-right orientations or other frequently posited factors, such as education, science literacy, and social media use. Our findings encourage researchers to move beyond the traditional correlates of political behavior when examining beliefs that express anti-social tendencies or a deep skepticism of social and political institutions.

Iraq's popular mobilisation units: intra-sectarian rivalry and Arab Shi'a mobilisation from the 2003 invasion to Covid-19 pandemic

The Popular Mobilisation Units' (PMU) rise in Iraq resulted from a de facto, post-2003 hybridization of security governance, opposed to an emergency measure to combat Islamic State after 2014. Rather than a cohesive sectarian movement, the PMU moniker granted a government veneer to an array of pre-existing or new militias, representing a decentralized Shi'a Arab mobilisation prior to 2014, symptomatic of Iraq's divisive patronage politics. Perceived by the US and the Arab world as ‘pro-Iranian Shi'a militias', as a spoiler to Iraq's sovereignty, and an Iranian means of securing its control over Baghdad, while some militias began as NSAAs, the PMU have evolved into quasi-state actors by becoming part of the state, but not under its complete control. Ultimately, their power within Iraq is constrained by the other political institutions, such as the electoral cycle, the Shi'a clerical establishment, and a protest movement, in addition to a pandemic, Covid-19.

Civilizational Features of Russia’s Development in the Context of Modern Social Transformations

This article examines the main civilizational features of Russia’s development and their role in the modern socio-political transformations of Russian society. These features, according to the author, include the leading role of the state in the implementation of development projects and resource mobilization;uneven socio-political development in time and space (development of society by fits and starts);multiple conflicting tendencies in social dynamics;and periodic change of cultural and geopolitical vectors of development caused by social divisions and cleavages. The author attributes many of these features to the fact that Russia occupies an intermediate geographical, geopolitical and cultural-civilizational position between the Western and Eastern civilizations. The author argues that mere uncritical borrowing and copying of Western political institutions without reconfigurng and adapting them to the conditions of modern Russia will either make these institutions less effective or seriously distort them. He concludes that in developing and implementing socio-political and economic projects, it is essential to take into account both the general civilization features of Russia and the internal Russian regional and local specifics, local socio-cultural norms and traditions, since ignoring them may undermine the main social, cultural and value structures of Russian society. Further, amid today's global socio-political transformations and the numerous challenges associated with them, it is extremely important for successful socio-political development to organically combine traditions with the necessary social innovations. However, as shown in the article, present-day Russia does not have such an organic combination, and this is a serious hindrance to socio-economic and cultural development. This prompts the need to combine centralized planning and the implementation of federal development projects with the initiatives and proposals of local and regional communities, to take into account not only regional and local bureaucratic structures, but also “grassroots” initiatives coming from groups of active citizens and from public organizations, volunteers and so on. The author comes to the conclusion that this is especially important in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the crisis socio-economic and political phenomena it causes. © 2022, Russian Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.

Electing the Mayors in Romania's Big Cities in 2020: Voter Turnout, Legislative Changes, and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Local elections have been theorized by many scholars as lower rank or second-order national elections: they are less important, less relevant, and just not as interesting as national elections. In Romania, turnout in local elections was, until the mid-2000s, quite high, even if lower than in parliamentary elections. Since 2008, however, turnout in local elections has been consistently higher than in parliamentary elections. The electoral reform that started in 2011 had, over time, a negative influence on the electoral process in the local elections. In this paper, we argue that the transition from the election of mayors using a majority electoral system in two rounds to a single round has contributed to the decline of citizens' interest in local elections, exerting a detrimental influence on the quality of political representation in general. Despite the arguments used by many of the supporters of this electoral reform, that electing the mayors in just one round will generate an increase in turnout because the competition will be fiercer, the effect was the opposite. The year 2020 marked a historic low in terms of turnout in local elections in Romania. Analyzing the official electoral data at county level and for each county capital, we will show that the health crisis generated by the COVID-19 pandemic had a minor influence on voting turnout. Instead, the specifics of the electoral law meant that, in the vast majority of county capitals, the turnout was significantly lower that the county average and the mayor was elected without reaching 50% of the votes (in many cases, the winning candidate failed to obtain more than 30% of the valid votes cast), which poses a major problem regarding the representativeness of elected mayors, as well as the stability and political balance within local political institutions.

Introduction to the Special Issue

The US presidential election in November will therefore be a critical juncture, either deepening disputes and hardening attitudes if Donald Trump is reelected, or possibly opening a new chapter in relations if Joe Biden wins. On the three global issues—trade, climate change, and the pandemic —that dominate US-China debate, Gregory Chin shows that while the Trump administration has brought "major global institutions to the point of legal or political crisis," China has seized opportunities to stand as the guardian of globalization in multilateral institutions, notably the World Trade Organization and the World Health Organization. [...]Chin ends on a cautiously optimistic note, namely, that a Biden White House might be open to cooperation with China on climate change and global health, while also rejoining multilateral institutions such as WHO and the Paris climate accords. [...]he cautions that the future will be non-zero-sum and messy.

Political regimes and deaths in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic

This article provides a quantitative examination of the link between political institutions and deaths during the first 100 days of the COVID-19 pandemic. We demonstrate that countries with more democratic political institutions experienced deaths on a larger per capita scale than less democratic countries. The result is robust to the inclusion of many relevant controls, a battery of estimation techniques and estimation with instrumental variables for the institutional measures. Additionally, we examine the extent to which COVID-19 deaths were impacted heterogeneously by policy responses across types of political institutions. Policy responses in democracies were less effective in reducing deaths in the early stages of the crisis. The results imply that democratic political institutions may have a disadvantage in responding quickly to pandemics.

Political and institutional communication and the media in times of pandemic. Analysis of the dialogue on vaccines in five Ibero-America countries

The current media context is characterized as a hybrid system in which old and new actors coexist and, at the same time, compete for their hegemony in the media sphere. In this context, Covid-19 has generated an "infodemic" or information overexposure that has made it difficult for citizens to access reliable sources and guidance. Therefore, the main objective of this article is to characterize the political, institutional and media actors who have reported on Twitter about vaccines and immunization processes during the Covid-19 pandemic in five Ibero-American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Spain and Mexico. To this end, a total of 68,822 tweets from 84 accounts belonging to the country's presidents, the official accounts of governments, health authorities and their spokespersons, and the main media have been analyzed. The results indicate that the most intense activity and the informative weight have been carried by the health authorities and the media, although the personal accounts of the spokespersons and political representatives have achieved a much greater engagement. The interaction of the audiences has been mostly positive, although the most active users and with the highest level of participation have made comments for the most part negative. These results allow us to conclude that in the hybrid system, the media and institutional communication cabinets show a similar capacity to disseminate messages through social networks that generate a favorable reception, although in the case of public representatives, engagement, and also the polarization, they are much greater.

The Challenges of Political Corruption in Australia, the Proposed Commonwealth Integrity Commission Bill (2020) and the Application of the APUNCAC

Political corruption affects each nation-state differently, but the outcomes are nominally the same: a deficit of public trust, weakened government institutions and undermined political systems. This article analyzes issues of political corruption in Australia by framing them within a national integrity ecosystem (NIE) and addressing them against the proposed Commonwealth Integrity Commission (CIC) 2020 bill. It also discusses prevalent ‘grey’ areas of Australian politically-corrupt behavior where they interact with the private sector: the revolving door, political donations, and lobbying;and the state of Australia’s implementation of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention. This article argues for their inclusion within the mandated scope of the proposed CIC. There is a need for strong legislation, both domestic and international, to fight corruption. This article then discusses the application of the provisions of the draft Anticorruption Protocol to the UN Convention Against Corruption (APUNCAC) that may apply with respect to these ‘grey’ issues, and how an International Anti-Corruption Court may provide another institutional model for Australia to follow. Finally, this article links these proposals to the 2021 UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on Corruption and the 9th Conference of States Parties on the UNCAC (COSP9). These events illustrate multilateral momentum and progress on anti-corruption. As a country that has historically supported the UN multilateral framework and its institutions, this article recommends a proactive approach for Australia so that the passing of a strong domestic anticorruption initiative will contribute to the adoption, and eventual ratification, of the APUNCAC.

The Good Governance Quandary: The Elusive Search for Role Models

A substantial consensus has emerged in development circles that the reason why some countries are rich and others poor is largely a reflection of the quality of their institutions – political, bureaucratic, and legal – and that countries with seriously dysfunctional institutions cannot expect to pursue a successful long-term trajectory of economic and social development. Many studies support this consensus, but institutional reform efforts for developed countries have resulted in mixed to weak results;many of these efforts have failed, for example, to establish a robust rule of law to protect the rights of citizens, publicly accountable political regimes, a meritocratic, noncorrupt, and efficient bureaucracy, and an independent media. Reportedly up to 60% of donor-assisted reforms have yielded no measurable increase in government effectiveness. It is inferred from this disappointing result that institutional transplants are often ineffective, and the path dependence, caused by accretions of the particularities of given countries’ histories, cultures, politics, ethnic and religious make-up, and geography leaves each country, for the most part, “to write its own history”.

Everyday Nationalism in Unsettled Times: In Search of Normality during Pandemic

Pandemics and other crisis situations result in unsettled times, or ontologically insecure moments when social and political institutions are in flux. During such crises, the ordinary and unnoticed routines that structure everyday life are thrust into the spotlight as people struggle to maintain or recreate a sense of normalcy. Drawing on a range of cases including China, Russia, the UK, and USA, we examine three categories of everyday practice during the COVID-19 pandemic that respond to disruptions in daily routines and seek a return to national normality: performing national solidarities and exclusions by wearing face masks;consuming the nation in the form of panic buying and conspiracy theories;and enforcing foreign policies through social media and embodiment. This analysis thus breaks with existing works on everyday nationalism and banal nationalism that typically focus on pervasively unnoticed forms of nationalism during settled times, and it challenges approaches to contentious politics that predict protest mobilization for change rather than restoration of the status quo ante. In highlighting the ways that unsettled times disrupt domestic and international structures, this work also presents a first attempt to link everyday nationalism with growing work on international practices.

Tv versus internet: How media consumption affects the approval of the authorities

The article considers the features of the Russians’ media consumption and their attitudes to political institutions (federal and regional). The survey of the population of the Republic of Mordovia aimed at finding correlations between the use of certain information channels, the level of trust in them, and the approval of the authorities. The study showed that the choice of traditional media (television, newspapers, magazines, radio) or new media (social networks, Internet websites, telegram channels) divides people into groups according to their political preferences. Traditional media (conditionally the “TV” party) tend to unite representatives of older cohorts living in rural areas and supporting the government. New media (conditionally the “Internet” party) tend to attract mainly young people living in cities, having a relatively high level of education and being critical of political institutions. The author believes that there is a potential for reconciliation of these two ‘parties’ — in the communicative possibilities of personal connections (friends, relatives, acquaintances), because the close social circle seems to provide grounds for discussing the current situation in the country and the region. The results of the survey show a high level of distrust to all information channels and a low level of approval of the authorities. The situation is aggravated by the coronavirus crisis: skepticism about official information determined a significant number of rumors discrediting political institutions, which in the future may negatively affect election campaigns at all levels. © S.G. Ushkin, 2021.

Postliberal Politics: The Coming Era of Renewal, Adrian Pabst (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2021), 160 pp., cloth $69.95, paperback $19.95, eBook $16

Much of the reflection offered in the book comes through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the systemic failures it has highlighted in political systems, institutions, and communities, as well as the basic realization that we are profoundly social beings who need meaningful connections in our lives. The book is not without its flaws, including an at-times-confusing organizational structure, as well as some misplaced jabs at Black Lives Matter and critical race theory. Among these problems is climate change, on which Pabst focuses one of the book's final chapters.

HOW NOVEL CORONAVIRUS HAS SHAKEN PUBLIC TRUST IN DECISION-MAKING INSTITUTIONS: COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF SELECTED EUROPEAN UNION MEMBERS

Since its first outbreak in December 2019, the novel coronavirus has spread rapidly around the world, affecting all countries and becoming a global crisis. As of August 2021, more than 220 million people have been infected and more than four million people have lost their lives to COVID-19 disease. Many countries around the globe have taken very strict and unprecedented measures to limit the further spread of the novel coronavirus and reduce the number of hospital cases and deaths. The aim of this paper is to analyse and discuss the public health measures in selected member states of the European Union related to the spread of novel coronavirus and the outcomes of these measures, focusing on public confidence in policy-making institutions. We use publicly available data on this topic and test the hypothesis that high levels of public trust in decision-making institutions are directly correlated with compliance with the public health measures and restrictions adopted by these institutions to limit the spread and consequences of the novel coronavirus.