Project Details
Projekt
COVID-19 and Executive Personalization in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Latin America and the MENA Region
Applicants
Dr. David Kühn; Dr. Mariana Llanos; Dr. Thomas Richter
Subject Area
Political Science
Term
since 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 458646324
When the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread, leaders around the world were challenged to grapple with it. They issued stay-at-home orders or imposed lockdowns, quarantines, curfews and movement controls. Public gatherings, including elections, were delayed or canceled, freedoms of assembly, association and speech were limited, and democratic institutions were constrained in their work. Although many of these measures conformed to expert recommendations to contain the disease, they also provided executives with a window of opportunity to bolster power. International media reported plenty of evidence – from Russia to the USA, from Hungary to Brazil – revealing how power concentration in the chief executive was becoming ubiquitous and suggesting that a global increase of personalization of executive power might be underway. Executive personalization – the process by which the chief executive’s discretionary power grows at the expense of other political actors – may have long-lasting negative policy consequences across political regimes. Thus, understanding the roots of this phenomenon is necessary to preclude harm, save lives, avoid economic depression, and improve public health. Further, since the COVID-19 pandemic occurred in the context of a global backsliding of liberal democracy, the study of the micro-foundations that drive personalization is even more crucial.This project seeks to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the personalization of executive power in the Global South. As the scholarly literature has documented, triggering events or external shocks – such as a pandemic – empower incumbents to steer the critical situation, deepen power asymmetries in their favor, and weaken civil society and political actors’ willingness and ability to counteract their actions. This trend may be particularly worrying in the regions of the Global South where constraints on the chief executives were already weak and processes of personalization well established, both in democratic and authoritarian regimes, although never comparatively assessed. In this project, we will develop a concept of the personalization of executive power that is novel for its application across regime types and different world regions and construct a theory of the personalization of the executive during the COVID-19 pandemic. To analyze the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic upon the personalization of executive power, we will collect empirical data on such personalization before and during the COVID-19 pandemic across 36 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Latin America and the MENA region. The project aims to contribute to the burgeoning literature on democratic backsliding and autocratization, the emerging research on the political impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the diverse contributions from area studies that have long tracked patterns and processes of personalization within the Global South.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
International Connection
Austria, Brazil, Lebanon, Malawi
