Pandemic Backsliding: Public Communication and Autocratization during Crises

Our newly developed Pandemic Democratic Violations-Index captures violations of democratic standards for emergency responses. Based on factual data and prior expert assessment of the quality of liberal-democratic institutions and rights, the regularly updated index currently covers 142 countries' responses on covid-19 from early April 2020 onward. More specifically, we observe several types of violations such as the expansion of executive power without sunset clause, discriminatory measures, restrictions of civil liberties, limitations of the legislature or judicial oversight as well as arbitrary and abusive enforcement and governmental misinformation campaigns. The index reveals that there seems to be a puzzling variation concerning the responses of those governments which score high on violating democratic standards: While some arbitrarily enforce a range of disproportionate emergency measurements, others violate their accountability by spreading misinformation campaigns which downplay covid-19 and disguise their inability or reluctance to adequately deal with the crisis. This paper investigates into this puzzle and thereby offers three contributions: First, based on our new Pandemic Democratic Violations-Index and with the help of innovative computational text as data methods we look into the differing communication strategies of those governments which substantially violate democratic standards during the current crisis. Second, we systematically analyze how these differing communication strategies correlate with other crucial factors such as covid-19 death rates, capacities of the health system, prior levels of autocratization, diffusion effects, and regime-specific aspects (e.g. federalism, presidentialism, personalist rulers, etc.). Thirdly and on a more general level, we illustrate how these novel empirical insights help to refine our theories on the relationship between crises and autocratization.