Personalism and the Pandemic: Self-Interest, Accountability, and Covid-19 Responses Under Authoritarianism and Democratic Erosion

Both democratic and authoritarian governments have struggled to respond to multitude of challenges presented by the Covid-19 pandemic. While a binary democracy-autocracy distinction may not be illuminating, personalistic governments stand out as a common factor among the bungled responses that have come at high human costs. Personalism is typically used to denote a category of authoritarian regimes, yet even freely elected leaders may be personalistic, seeking to erode democratic institutions, centralize power, and bend the state to serve their will. In both authoritarian and more democratic personalist governments, there are different levels of institutional control over the state apparatus, civil society, and media. There is also variation in the audiences or alliances on which leaders rely to maintain their power and to whom leaders are potentially accountable. This paper explores how variation in institutional control and accountability has constrained or enabled personalistic leaders’ self-interested behavior during the Covid-19 pandemic in a range of cases around the globe. I examine the longer-standing authoritarian personalist governments of Yoweri Museveni in Uganda and Vladimir Putin in Russia; the more recent authoritarian personalist government of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, and the governments of three leaders who were democratically elected in the past five years, but have been steadily seeking to erode democratic institutions: John Magufuli in Tanzania, Donald Trump in the United States, and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. These leaders vary in the types and levels of institutional constraints on their behavior and their control of policy at the nation and subnational levels; in the depth of their entrenchment in power and the strength of opposition forces; and, and in their degrees of family involvement in the government and in economic activities leveraging the leader’s power. Comparison of the political dynamics of these different cases and their respective Covid-19 responses will further understanding of how these regimes respond to crises, how outside actors can productively engage with personalist regimes to support human rights and global public health, and the potential long-term impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on personalistic leaders’ power.