COVID-19, Opportunism, Pretext, and Subnational Democracy
Calling in “Sick”: COVID-19, Opportunism, Pretext, and Subnational Democracy Matthew Stenberg, Philip Rocco, and Safia Abukar Farole August 3, 2021 As governments sought to manage the Coronavirus pandemic, many pursed a temporary increase in centralized authority, a general tactic of crisis management. However, in some countries, centralization in the name of public health was not the only motive. The COVID-19 response coincided with broader worldwide trends towards democratic backsliding and authoritarian consolidation. Some of these efforts happened while the world was preoccupied with responding to the pandemic without concretely referencing Coronavirus; however, in other cases, public health rationales are clearly and explicitly invoked as a pretext for actions that instead aid the consolidation of regime authority. This has been especially pernicious in subnational democracy, where efforts have been made to undermine the ability of opposition parties to fairly contest in local and regional politics. This paper looks at four cases in which political actors either opportunistically used worldwide distraction from the COVID-19 pandemic or explicitly invoked public health while seeking to undermine long-term domestic contestation in their jurisdictions: Hong Kong, Hungary, Uganda, and the United States. We examine the use of public health as a pretext or opportunity for undermining opposition parties, recentralizing political authority in dominant actors, and inhibiting the fair contestation of elections. We would like to thank Nisha Bellinger, Kai Yui Samuel Chan, Lucas Dolan, Laura Jakli, Brad Kent, and Todd LaPorte for helpful comments. Introduction Organizational theory posits that even in the most horizontal organizations, a crisis will centralize decision-making in the hands of a small group of leaders (Hermann 1963; Holsti 1972; ’T Hart, Rosenthal, and Kouzmin 1993).
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