Description
Previous perspectives on hybrid regimes invite us to view this political system as robust, maintaining stability through a nexus of democratic and authoritarian components, with performance legitimacy a central aspect. Yet, since COVID-19, hybrid regimes have encountered enormous volatility in their democratic status due to the extensive crisis management interactions required during pandemics, and how performance legitimacy has unfolded. This paper presents the research question of whether pandemics hold enough volatility that impacts hybrid regime stability, arguing that to fully understand the dynamics of this volatility, as well as the intersection of the COVID-19 pandemic as a policy challenge, we must understand how combining preexisting regime features with crisis governance effectively leads to four different pathways for hybrid regimes. Such pathways have been identified as increasing democratisation, increasing authoritarianism, random fluctuations, and unchanged. Analysing VDEM data that is integrated with datasets that capture COVID-19 mortality data, policy response type, and policy stringency data from a 2020 starting point until a 2023 cutoff for multiple countries classified as hybrid regimes, this paper provides empirically supported statistical drivers of the various pathways. This analysis supports the primary hypothesis of hybrid regime destabilisation influenced by pandemics and exacerbated through institutional governance, and the subsequent display of shifts within their democratic level. These shifts are hypothesised to be due to the interaction between centralised or co-opted policy decision making, and the output legitimacy of rising or falling COVID-19 mortality rates. Each pathway is dependent upon COVID-19 mortality as a measure of performance legitimacy, and a gage of policy success and citizenry support or dismay for incumbent performance.
