Limitations of democratic rights during the Covid-19 pandemic—exploring the citizens’ perception and discussions on dangers to democracy in Germany

Abstract

The governments’ mitigation measures to fight the COVID-19 pandemic are unprecedented in our post-war history. For overcoming this crisis, citizens were expected to act in compliance with these measures in order to control the spread of the virus and keep public health systems functional. This call for protecting the public health at the same time confronted citizens with several and severe limitations of their democratic freedoms and rights: confinement, restriction on freedoms of movement, religion, specific provisions for public protest and finally also limitations to the right of education by school closures. This paper analyzes how citizens perceive the threat the COVID-19 pandemic and especially the mitigation measures posed for democracy. We assume that pandemic waves and pandemic fatigue have an impact on the perception of threat. To see the overall societal picture, we exploit a large-scale archive of online discourse on Twitter out of which we extract democracy-related discourse with the same temporal and geospatial coverage for our investigation. From that data source, we apply computational methods to extract time series data reflecting aggregated opinions and their evolution over time concerned with the correlation of attitudes towards democracy. We them move deeper using a longitudinal panel survey we conducted in November/December 2020, March/April 2021, and July/August 2021. to have a view of the relationship between citizens’ socio-economic status and basic political attitudes. Our multi-method analysis bases on the German case and covers the period from December 2020 to August 2021.

Democratic health in the corona pandemic. The corona pandemic as a trigger or amplifier of democratic erosion or autocratization?

“…Covering the period from December 2020 to August 2021 by using two independent sources of data (longitudinal panel survey and large-scale analysis of Twitter tweets), the authors are able to track the perceptions about democracy in Germany over time, and link citizens' perceptions with their socio-economic status, political attitudes, and trust in government. As a key result the authors detect time relatedness (the longer the pandemic endured, the more concern on democratic damage increased) as well as the intensity of the pandemic (increasing COVID-19 cases and deaths) as relevant factors for the fluctuation of satisfaction with democracy during the pandemic in Germany (Katsanidou et al 2023). They can also show that pandemic concerns for democracy were higher around May 2021, in comparison to December 2020, but then calmed again in August 2021.…”

Rally and Rage: The Gap between Specific and Pandemic-Specific Support for Governments in Europe

“…The severity of the violations of democratic rights and freedoms did not, however, correlate with better public health outcomes (Edgell et al 2021). Judgments about government policy delivery were positively linked to satisfaction with the way democracy works (Clarke et al 1993;Katsanidou et al 2023). As satisfaction with the way democracy works is a summary indicator of people's views about what democracy delivers but also whether it abstains from undesirable illiberal or authoritarian practices (Linde and Eckman 2003), people satisfied with the way democracy works in their country expressed less satisfaction with the government's handling of COVID-19 in their country compared to their general satisfaction with the national government performance.…”

“…As concerns negative political effects, the COVID-19 crisis arrived at times of a broader crisis of democracy. Governments seized power (Guasti and Bustikova 2022), declared states of emergency, limited or even suspended individual freedoms (political rights and civil liberties including the freedom of assembly, religious rights, freedom of movement, and the right to education), and undermined democracy (Delanty 2020;Edgell et al 2021;Engler et al 2021;Lewkowicz et al 2021;Katsanidou et al 2023).…”