Thriving or Thwarted? Examining Chief Executives and their Constraining Counterparts amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic

The personalization of political power is a ubiquitous trend in modern politics, occurring across world regions and regime boundaries. Formerly associated predominantly with authoritarian politics, this trend has gained increased prominence within numerous democracies. Yet, we lack appropriate conceptual and theoretical tools to measure and explain its prevalence and variations across different contexts. While existing literature tends to conceptualize personalization as a power increase of the chief executive at the expense of other political actors, the nature of these ‘constraining actors’ is not yet fully understood. This study aims to enrich our understanding of executive personalization by studying political actors beyond the chief executive. Employing an original conceptual framework of the personalization of political power, we compare over 30 cases from the Global South during the COVID-19 pandemic selected through stratified random sampling. In each case we examine the processes and means how chief executives have (un)successfully personalized power by undermining the constraining capacities of other political actors. Through a media analysis of personalization event, we identify who these pivotal actors are and try to shed light on the nuanced mechanisms that chief executives have used to consolidate authority and control. By moving beyond traditional regime-based classifications, our study stresses the similar dynamics of power personalization in both authoritarian and democratic settings. Findings of this paper will have important implications for our understanding of the political dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic but also for the personalization of political power more generally.