Existential insecurity and deference to authority: the pandemic as a natural experiment

IntroductionThe global coronavirus pandemic offers a quasi-experimental setting for understanding the impact of sudden exposure to heightened existential risk upon both individual and societal values. MethodsWe examined the effect of the pandemic on political attitudes by comparing data from eight countries surveyed before and after the worldwide spread of COVID-19 in March 2020 with continuous weekly polling tracker data from the United Kingdom from 2019 to 2021. Multilevel models were used to explore the drivers of change, and the results indicated that reported emotions of fear and stress were positively associated with institutional approval during periods of greater pathogen risk. ResultsOur findings revealed that support for political and technocratic authority, as well as satisfaction with political institutions, rose significantly above long-term historical baselines during the pandemic. DiscussionThe results support the hypothesis that exposure to existential risk results in greater support for authority and that individual feelings of insecurity may be linked to less critical citizen orientations.

COVID-19 Policy in Uzbekistan: Slipping Back Toward Authoritarianism?

Since the death of Islom Karimov in September 2016, the government of Uzbekistan has witnessed almost 4 years of slow but steady political reform. President Shavkat Mirzayoyev initiated restructuring in the law enforcement agencies, intelligence service and military, all that moved the country away from the police state that Karimov constructed in his 25-year reign. In particular, Mirzayoyev restricted the power of the criminal police and the traffic police, the latter a particularly despised organization because of their corruption and abuse of power. Beginning in March 2020, the Uzbek government began extending the powers of law enforcement, including reopening the interregional traffic police checkpoints which had been closed in 2017. The country implemented a strict quarantine, confining people to their homes except for trips for food, medical treatment and a handful of other "essential” activities. Other authoritarian measures, with little if any connection to controlling the spread of infection, have also been imposed in the political, religious and media spheres. This chapter explores the political changes COVID-19 has wrought in Uzbekistan, especially in the context of ongoing reforms directed toward fighting corruption and increasing political freedom. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

THREATS TO DEMOCRACY: CAN IT BE SUSTAINED, AND WHAT MIGHT REPLACE IT?

Democracy has increasingly come under pressure as democratic norms are being eroded. This article explores why democratic processes are at risk in Europe and the United States and what might replace them. It reflects the thinking of the Study Group on Democracy convened under the auspices of the International Association for Intelligence Education in 2022. Its deliberations identified a set of underlying key drivers, documented how they manifested, and speculated on what new forms of governance might replace democratic rule. Recent trends cited include the corruption of norms, the disruptive influence of social media, the growing diversity of society, the shift from community-based problem-solving to reliance on identity politics, the emergence of existential threats, and the need for strong leadership. The group concludes that prospects for sustaining democratic institutions can best be understood by viewing future trends along two perspectives: the complexity of society and modes of decision-making.

The CCP after the Zero-Covid Fail

China has two repressive systems that exist simultaneously: the highly coercive and surveilled system in Xinjiang, and the trust-based model of everyday repression prevalent throughout the rest of the country. The trust-based model has undergirded grassroots governance in China and facilitated the routine implementation of Zero-Covid. Drawing on a protest event dataset, I analyze the key characteristics of the covid protests erupted in November and December of 2022, before situating them in the larger context of China's political future under Xi Jinping's rule. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has responded to the protests with a combination of concession and repression. But neither the carrot nor the stick is able to fundamentally address the deep-rooted social problems or halt the tide of dissent. Coupled with structural economic challenges, these protests could be the harbinger of a new era of contentious state-society relations in China, the seeds of which were sown years ago–only precipitated and underscored by the CCP's covid debacle.

Is Democracy Lost?

President Kais Saied's de facto dissolution of parliament in July 2021, abandonment of the constitution, and targeting of the opposition are clear signs that Tunisia is no longer a democracy and has returned to the authoritarian playbook of Arab leaders past and present. I see three main reasons for this abrupt end to Tunisia's decade-old democracy: 1) the failure to accompany political reform with socioeconomic gains for citizens;2) the subsequent rise of populism;and 3) the mistakes of the Islamic party. To move forward in Tunisia and the Arab world more broadly, prodemocratic forces must link freedom, development, and social justice.

Introduction: Theorizing the psychology of deglobalization

The unprecedented pace and scope of globalization over the past half century have had major impacts on the field of psychology. We observe that since the 2008 financial crisis, there have been increased academic and political concerns with "deglobalization,” which is often associated with terrorism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, Brexit, the US–China trade war, the Russian war on Ukraine, and the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that the phenomenon of deglobalization is historically uncertain but intellectually and politically significant enough to warrant analysis. Thus, in this special issue, we begin to theorize the psychology of deglobalization by addressing several foundational issues: the major manifestations of deglobalization in relation to psychosocial life, the dialectical relations between globalization and deglobalization, and possible ways to respond to the challenges of deglobalization. In the meantime, we flesh out these theoretical perspectives using the cases of nationalism, neoliberalism, White supremacy, far-right politics, dehumanization, isolationism, and trade conflicts.

The Long Game: The Opposition Wins in Honduras

Opposition parties in competitive authoritarian regimes rarely win elections by a landslide, especially where poverty, repressive security forces, and clientelism abound. Yet in November 2021, Honduras's opposition defeated the incumbent National Party against the odds. This essay argues that the opposition succeeded by "playing the long game": 1) building a mass-party organization, 2) continually participating in elections, and 3) forging unity through power-sharing. Paradoxically, the Honduran opposition's lack of international support incentivized these choices and became a blessing in disguise. Whether Xiomara Castro will rebuild democracy remains uncertain, but her coalition's route to power yields lessons for oppositions elsewhere.

Agents of Change? Families, Welfare and Democracy in Mid-to-Late Twentieth-Century Europe

Families have always been vulnerable. They have long been torn apart by the mass migrations of warfare, the oppression of minority groups, the closure of international borders and the refugee crises governed ‘from above'. Families have also always been powerful symbols. Nationalist–populist movements have capitalised on fears about familial decline and liberal democracies have built moralistic views of the family into their welfare systems. Yet, this special issue aims to demonstrate that families have not merely been objects or subjects buffeted by political and social change. Rather, families have also consistently acted as ‘agents of change'. This is not to valorise the family – families have been patriarchal, damaging and oppressive as well as supportive, empowering and caring. However, this is to say that historical work must take ‘the family' seriously as an active participant in shaping historical change.

Countering Beijing's Media Manipulation

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long sought to influence media coverage about China in other countries. Over the past decade, this campaign has accelerated, reaching new world regions and topics. This article examines how CCP-linked actors seek to manipulate foreign information environments in four key ways: disseminating propaganda, spreading disinformation, censoring critical coverage, and controlling the infrastructure used to convey news. This article considers which efforts have yielded gains for the regime, obstacles that Beijing has encountered, and the response of nongovernmental actors. It concludes by considering how to enhance democratic resilience to the covert and coercive dimensions of the CCP's global media influence.

Documents on Democracy

Global/Canada The post–Cold War assumption of democracy's inevitable triumph—described by Francis Fukuyama as the "End of History" thesis—does not apply to our world, and democracies need to adjust accordingly, argues Canada's deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland. The jeers I face in Question Period, the fact-checking of skeptical journalists, the hard verdict of the ballot box—all of these make me a better minister than I would be if we governed in splendid authoritarian isolation. Support independent workers' power in and beyond these protests;abolish anti-worker practices like the 996 work schedule and strengthen labor law protections, including protecting workers' right to strike and self-organization, so they can participate more extensively in political life. Avoid the risky tactic of long-term occupation of streets and town squares—adopt "Be Water"-style mobilization to prevent authorities from too easily clamping down on protesters.

Evolution of the trust in collective responsibility to deal with the pandemic: some findings of an online survey in two moments

Social trust is highlighted in various studies as a very important factor in achieving greater compliance with regulations and measures aimed at preventing COVID-19 infections. However, other studies also conclude that this same trust has been negatively affected by the pandemic and the situations experienced by the population in the two years after begining. This article aims to contribute to the knowledge and debate on this important issue by offering some findings from an online survey carried out on the Spanish population at two crucial moments in the pandemic: the first and the third wave of infections.

Dual Evolutionary Foundations of Political Ideology Predict Divergent Responses to COVID-19

Political conservatives' opposition to COVID-19 restrictions is puzzling given the well-documented links between conservatism and conformity, threat sensitivity, and pathogen aversion. We propose a resolution based on the Dual Foundations Theory of ideology, which holds that ideology comprises two dimensions, one reflecting trade-offs between threat-driven conformity and individualism, and another reflecting trade-offs between empathy-driven cooperation and competition. We test predictions derived from this theory in a UK sample using individuals' responses to COVID-19 and widely-used measures of the two dimensions - 'right-wing authoritarianism' (RWA) and 'social dominance orientation' (SDO), respectively. Consistent with our predictions, we show that RWA, but not SDO, increased following the pandemic and that high-RWA conservatives do display more concerned, conformist, pro-lockdown attitudes, while high-SDO conservatives display less empathic, cooperative attitudes and are anti-lockdown. This helps explain paradoxical prior results and highlights how a focus on unidimensional ideology can mask divergent motives across the ideological landscape.

Authoritarian Crisis Response to COVID-19 in China

What explains the Chinese government's differentiated response to the COVID-19 pandemic? This chapter argues that the same sources of control in authoritarian crisis response that enable the state to mobilize resources and people hamper the flexibility and nimbleness needed to adapt amid uncertainty. It analyzes how political priorities in a predominantly top-down system and experience with past infectious disease outbreaks shape the public health approach to COVID-19 and examines the response from late 2019 through mid-2022 in three approximate phases: early missteps and institutional impediments, rapid shift in response effectiveness, and top-down control and cracks in zero-COVID. Initial reactions were dispersed and incremental as local officials wrestled with how loudly to sound the alarms on the emergence of a new respiratory virus that seemed to be spreading. Beijing eventually backed a centralized, coordinated effort. The ramped-up response was effective, if authoritarian and heavy-handed at times. Since then, the scale and speed of the state's ability to assemble testing, tracing, quarantining, and isolating capacity and other measures enabled China to generally enclose inevitable flare-ups in most of 2020 and 2021. But unyielding pursuit of dynamic zero-COVID policy through mid-2022 reveals a fragile flip side of dogged top-down control. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

The politics of civil society narratives in contestation between liberalism and nationalism in authoritarian Vietnam

The liberal-dominated civil society theory tends to obscure the dynamics and intricacy of state-society relations in authoritarian contexts. Existing accounts on Vietnam have not cast adequate light onto the struggles of ideology and positions between the state and civil society. Drawing on the most recent data from social media in Vietnam, the article contributes a new analytical approach to understanding state-society relations by offering granular insights into the contrasting but mutually reinforcing narratives adopted by the state and civil society actors. In particular, the article steers attention towards the opportunities that crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic have provided for ideological struggles and legitimacy building between these actors. The paper argues that rather than continuously pushing forward the rhetoric 'civic space is shrinking', these alternatives must be steeped within wider historical understanding, attuned to particularities of the social-political context, and ultimately reflective of the evolving intricate state-society relations. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Contemporary Politics is the property of Routledge 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.)

Biopolitical Binaries (or How Not to Read the Chinese Protests)

On 26 November 2022, prompted by a deadly fire in a high-rise apartment block in Ürümqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, protesters took to streets and university campuses across China calling for an end to the country's restrictive ‘zero Covid' policy (清零政策) (Davidson and Yu 2022). With its zero-Covid policy, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has attempted to position itself as the polar opposite of governments in the West and the United States in particular—as a biopolitical state that ‘deploys its governing techniques in the name of defending the security of life against external threats' (L.G. 2022: 139), which represents a centralised technocracy starkly distinct from the class-based revolutionary politics of the Mao Zedong era. [...]the emergence of the much more transmissible Omicron variant of the virus, the Chinese Government successfully mobilised the population, state, and economy in a concerted effort to suppress transmission through newly developed surveillance technologies aimed at systematically mapping, tracking, and containing the population. In their recent book on the pandemic, What World is This?, Judith Butler (2022) argues that the normalisation of deaths due to Covid-19 means the acceptance of a percentage of the population as disposable—or a society in which ‘mass death among less grievable subjects plays an essential role in maintaining social welfare and public order' (Lincoln 2021: 46). If it is a natural disaster, the party appears as the saviour;human-made catastrophes, on the other hand, raise questions about responsibility and point to broader systemic issues.

Renewable Energy and Governance Resilience in the Gulf

The six Gulf monarchies—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates (UAE)—are more politically stable than their peers in the Middle East and North Africa. Explanations for governance resilience range from repression to neopatrimonial and instrumental legitimacy, hydrocarbon-based rentierism, and permissive regional and international environments. This paper considers, in view of the proliferation and uptake of renewable energy in the Gulf, how governance resilience may be affected as a result of changes in state-society relations during the energy transition away from a fossil-fuel-based energy system. It offers a qualitative analysis of the impact of renewable energy deployment in the Gulf, supported by a rich array of secondary literature and data. It also offers a deep, if brief, dive to highlight intra-regional nuances. The authors conclude that in the short term, renewable energy deployment has a very modest impact given its limited share of power generation. In the longer term, even assuming that stated ambitions for renewable energy are fulfilled, no negative impact on monarchial resilience is expected thanks to gains in legitimacy and revenue streams, as well as purposeful alignment with an external environment supportive of renewable power in developing countries.

Praising a Dead Dictator: How US Officials' Visits to Taiwan Wade into Complex Historical Debates

The trip occurred soon after Nancy Pelosi had visited the island with a bipartisan delegation of other elected US officials in what was the first visit by a US Speaker of the House of Representatives in 25 years, since Newt Gingrich's mission in 1997 (Timsit 2022). At that point, public comments by US President Joe Biden suggested that he viewed the visit as inadvisable, given the potential for escalation by China in response (Desiderio and Ward 2022). Since the Biden administration took power, it has been more common for US politicians to announce visits to Taiwan only once they have arrived, to minimise the window for China to react. [...]Pelosi's journey was fraught with symbolism—significant stops included meetings with semiconductor executives and a visit to a former prison from the authoritarian era to meet with Tiananmen Square student leader and Uyghur dissident Wu'er Kaixi;the last of the Hong Kong Causeway Bay booksellers to remain free, Lam Wing-kee;and Taiwanese human rights nongovernmental organisation worker Lee Ming-che, who was arrested in China and detained for five years on charges of subversion of state power (Apple Daily 2022).

Social dominance orientation, right-wing authoritarianism, and political attitudes toward governmental performance during the COVID-19 pandemic

This research examined the association of social dominance orientation (SDO) and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) with the evaluations of the government's anti-coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) policies and performance. In Study 1 (N = 261), we found that SDO and RWA were positively associated with resistance to criticism about the government's anti-COVID-19 measures. In addition, SDO was positively associated with favorable evaluations of the government's performance in handling the crisis. Support for lockdown policies mediated these attitudes. In Study 2 (N = 438), the results show that SDO and RWA had indirect associations with beliefs in the superiority of China's political system through three mediation variables. Evaluations of the US government's performance in handling the COVID-19 pandemic were negatively associated with beliefs in the superiority of China's political system, and there was a negative relationship between evaluations of the Chinese and US governments' performances. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

The U.S.-Threat Discourse, Hawkish and Maneuvered Public, and China's Foreign Policy

It has been argued that Chinese public opinion is often instrumentalized by the government to accomplish maneuverability and flexibility in Chinese foreign policy. Meanwhile, the dynamic social media environment continues to develop in novel and sometimes unanticipated ways that have various consequences for Chinese foreign policy. Can the authoritarian Chinese government dynamically shape public opinion using social media as the main communication channel to produce and collect responses to international affairs? What effect does a highly unified public opinion have on China's foreign policy? The dynamics of posts on Weibo throughout 2020 and the frequency of comments pertaining to specific issues are examined in this study through content and sentiment analysis. The results demonstrate an alignment and suggest a correlation between Chinese public opinion and the attitudes of the party-state on China's foreign policy. The results indicate that Chinese public opinion exhibited an increasing sense of the superiority of China's achievements, an endogenous preference for more hawkish attitudes toward the U.S., and a drive for a "wolf warrior" diplomacy. This is both a consequence of governmental manipulation and education over the long term and a catalyst for a more hawkish foreign policy in the future. In the long run, the highly unified public opinion that has been intentionally created by the party-state may eventually require additional effort to justify foreign policy positions that the public considers insufficiently assertive.