Leaving democracy? Pandemic threat, emotional accounts and regime support in comparative perspective

Abstract

As a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments even in consolidated democracies have adopted drastic measures, temporarily constraining individual freedoms and expanding executive political decision making. In light of this trade-off between public health measures and democratic norms, it becomes crucial to assess the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on public support for democratic versus authoritarian regimes. Following insights of the affective intelligence theory, emotions, and not only rational considerations, are key to understanding behavioural and attitudinal responses to crises. In the article it is argued that the pandemic threat of COVID-19 affects regime preferences by evoking distinct negative emotions, in particular anger and fear. Using original survey data in six European countries, it is shown that COVID-19-induced anger and fear have divergent effects on regime preferences. While democratic regime preference has declined for angry respondents, there is also a message of hope: fearful respondents display increased support for a democratic regime.

Keywords:

• Support for democracy
• regime preference
• COVID-19 pandemic
• emotions
• affective intelligence theory

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Swiss Political Science Association Annual Congress. We are grateful to Daniel Auer and the other participants as well as the two anonymous referees and the Editors for their valuable feedback and suggestions, which have helped improve this paper tremendously.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethics declaration

The research design was approved by the Research Ethics Committee at the Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences of the University of Bern (approval number 092020).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the OSF data repository at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/N865R.

Notes

1 Of course, culture is not the only criterion—the key actors in the state must also reflect democratic norms and practices (constitution) and no significant groups should attempt to overthrow the regime (behavior) (Linz and Stepan 1996). For the purposes of our article, however, we focus on the culture criterion.

2 This article was written as part of a research project on ‘The Politics of Public Health Threat’ that is financially supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the Berne University Research Foundation. In this context, reference should also be made to the contributions by Filsinger and Freitag (2022), Freitag and Hofstetter (2022) and Wamsler et al. (2022), who are elaborating theoretically and empirically similar designs in a coherent research program.

3 A third system evaluates how well goal-seeking through habits and routines is working, triggering enthusiasm (Marcus et al.2000). Due to our focus on negative emotions triggered by threat, we do not include this in our analysis.

4 As a robustness check, we test whether the results are similar when using a measure of general emotions, asking respondents how they feel at the moment on a scale from (1) not at all to (5) extremely, with ‘upset’ and ‘hostile’ for general anger and ‘afraid’ and ‘nervous’ for general fear. While this measure asks respondents about their general emotions, the pandemic and its consequences were still on the forefront of people’s minds at this point in time. The results hold even when using this general measure of emotions, as can be seen in Table A5, model (1) in the online appendix.

5 These adjectives, among others, cover the more general dimensions of anger/aversion and fear/anxiety with different degrees of intensity. Other adjectives employed by literature in this context include ‘upset’, ‘disgusted’ or ‘resentful’ for anger/aversion and ‘uneasy’, ‘scared’ or ‘nervous’ for fear/anxiety (see Marcus et al.2000: 152–74).

6 We use subnational regions of comparable size and population for which subnational data was available (France: Régions; Germany: Bundersländer; Italy: Regioni; Spain: Comunidades autónomas + Ciudades autónomas; Switzerland: Cantons; United Kingdom: Government Office Regions (Regions) + Country).

7 As a robustness check, we use region-survey wave fixed effects instead and survey weights adjusting for the population size of regions within each country. This enables ruling out potential concerns about heterogeneity between subnational regions and differences in the selection probability between regions driving the effect. In addition, we also run a model including date of interview dummies to control for heterogeneity over the observation period. The results are essentially identical, as can be seen in Table A5, models (2) and (3) in the online appendix.

Additional information

Funding

This research was generously funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) (grant no. 100017_204507) and the Berne University Research Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Julian Erhardt

Julian Erhardt is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Political Science, University of Bern. His research interests lie in the fields of public opinion research and political sociology with particular focus on support for democracy, political trust, national identity, social capital as well as pandemic threat. [[email protected]]

Markus Freitag

Markus Freitag is Professor of Political Sociology and of Political Psychology at the Institute of Political Science, University of Bern. He has published on trust, social capital, direct democracy, comparative public policy, voter participation, political attitudes, civil war, personality and emotions. [[email protected]]

Maximilian Filsinger

Maximilian Filsinger is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Political Science, University of Bern. His research interests lie in the fields of comparative public opinion research and political sociology with particular emphasis on social capital, populist attitudes, support for democracy, and affective polarisation. [[email protected]]