COVID-19 Impact on State and Political Culture Dynamics

State dynamics has often been studied as related to political culture evolutions which mostly covered political attitudes toward state institutions and political leadership, governance and public policy. Political culture theory has been mainly concerned with political participation phenomena and dynamics. In turn, political participation has often been related to conflict phenomena and the relationship between the citizens and the state. COVID-19 impact on societal and polity levels emphasizes a class of phenomena which does not fit within the classic limits of political culture theory and research. Not only that it exceeds our classic view on political culture, moreover, COVID-19 appears as a complex phenomena which seems to announce a major shift in the social and political participation paradigms. The Internet, social media, and socializing networks are themselves overwhelmed by participation patterns which differ from what we used to know: opinion dynamics, social and political attitudes, behaviors and emotions are suddenly shaken by the rules of social distance, threats on public health and security. Social and political solidarity dynamics emphasized by big data patterns provide signals of deep change. The research questions are therefore meant to cover these issues by requiring investigation of the relationships between the citizens and the state as well as the relationships amongst citizens themselves. It is not only a matter of trust as we used to emphasize when studying authority emergence and consolidation patterns, it is more a matter of individual and social and political responsibility with regard to the community as a pattern of resistance against threat from both inside and outside sources. Our research investigates the impact of COVID-19 phenomenology on the sources of social and political responsibility pattern dynamics in the context of fragile democracies in the eastern half of Europe.