Citizens and States at Times of Emergency – Cross country comparison of attitudes to protests during the COVID crisis

Emergency times offer a unique opportunity to study norms and political culture (particularly citizens’ attitude and expectations of authorities), because prevailing norms and attitudes at such times of duress are reasonable to assume to come starkly to the fore and can become the catalysts of political change (Pelling and Dill 2006). Emergency times call for exceptional measures that may raise intriguing dilemmas how to balance between providing security, while at the same time preserving civil liberties. Although this question is of great significance, researchers so far have paid little attention to it probably because emergency situations were relatively rare in democracies in the past 50 years. The issue that effected numerous Western democracies during the past decades was terrorism, which was subsequently studied in detail, including the response of citizens to the introduction of extensive surveillance technologies (e.g. Helbling and Ziller 2020). It was with the outbreak of the COVID pandemic that citizens’ reaction to emergency measures became a hot topic (Alsan et. al. 2020, Brouard et.al. 2020), nevertheless the interest of these studies hardly touches upon how citizens can act and get mobilized in emergency times. In our paper we dissect two main questions: 1) What factors shape citizens’ attitude concerning restrictions on civil liberties and political participation. 2) How do citizens see restriction of opposition parties’ criticism? Do they think that even at times of crisis political engagement is crucial, or emergency times call for unity and the putting aside disagreements? Online surveys will be conducted in May 2021 in Hungary and Austria (supported by Austrian-Hungarian Action Foundation - OMAA). Data will be analysed by regression models.