Impact of COVID-19 on the Autocratisation Processes – Theoretical Aspects

The question of impact of COVID-19 on political regimes and the state of democracy in states all over the world is becoming an increasingly important research topic. It refers first of all to a possible enhancement of the autocratisation as a result of the pandemic. Thus, there is a need to work out a suitable theoretical framework to analyse this research question. The paper is aimed at proposing possible parts of this framework, taking as a starting point the approach to the autocratisation presented by Cassani and Tomini (2019, 2020), distinguishing three dimensions: executive limitation, contestation and participation. The author would like, firstly, to outline the actors and their COVID-19 related actions that may trigger autocratisation, and, secondly, possible scenarios in this context – treating the COVID-19 situation as a kind of crisis. Moreover, the proposed theoretical framework will also include the question of relationship between the state of emergency – usually present, in different forms, during the COVID-19 crisis and the autocratisation process, basing for example on the recent V-Dem studies (e.g. Lührmann and Rooney, 2020). The proposed theoretical framework has been applied in the project “De-democratization at the times of Covid-19” focusing on the cases of the Czech Republic, Italy and Poland and carried out at the University of Warsaw within the 4EU+ Alliance in 2020-2021.