Description
Hybrid regimes confronted COVID-19 with governance mixes that are neither fully democratic nor fully authoritarian. I trace and develop four pathways of crisis governance from V-Dem indicators, namely Cooptation Participatory, Cooptation Corruption, Centralisation Strategic, and Centralisation Repressive. The cooptation pair concerns how rulers secure consent, through inclusion or patronage. The centralisation pair concerns how rulers organise authority, through coordinated steering or coercive command. Validation finds that participatory cooptation often travels with strategic centralisation, while repressive centralisation tends to accompany corrupt cooptation; this loose pairing provides grounding to the development of the Crisis Governance Alignment framework used within the research. The analysis applies a Firth-type penalised multinomial logistic regression to 45 hybrid regimes to estimate the probabilities of three outcomes, democratisation, autocratisation, or status quo, during the COVID-19 onset. The bias reduction addresses small samples and rare transitions while keeping coefficients straightforward to interpret. Findings highlight most hybrids remain status quo during crisis, echoing prior literature on hybrid consolidation. When movement occurs, it concentrates at pathway extremes. Extreme scores on cooptation participatory, commonly alongside centralisation strategic, raise the probability of democratisation. Extreme scores on centralisation repressive, frequently paired with cooptation corruption, raise the probability of autocratisation. These effects sharpen at the corners of the pathway space, indicating that concentrated profiles act as accelerants under pressure. Disease burden and other pandemic shocks are not independent drivers once governance pathway are accounted for. The study reframes pandemic governance as patterned statecraft rather than ad hoc tool use. Inclusive participation tied to strategic coordination can stabilise and, at high intensity, open regimes. Coercive control tied to patronage stabilises by force, yet, at high intensity, speeds autocratic drift. Methodologically, bias-reduced multinomial modelling offers a practical way to study imbalanced outcomes and shows that extreme pathway scores condition crisis-time trajectories more than the pandemics severity itself.
