Autocratic Advantage and Incumbency Advantage in Pandemic Elections: Assessing Evidence from Asia and Europe

Despite the diffusion of democratic norms, upholding a “level playing field” is easier said than done in a world where electoral manipulation is widely practiced. Amidst a state of emergency, protracted lockdown, and various restrictive measures to stem the COVID-19 pandemic, electoral integrity was seriously challenged across regime types, deepening mistrust and exposing regime fragility as a result. Against this background, two lines of analysis have dominated the growing literature. First, the “autocratic advantage ”thesis according to which autocracies outperformed democracies in terms of political stability and curbing the disease. Second, the “rally round the flag” thesis which highlighted the “incumbency advantage” irrespective of regime types. This paper draws on the extant literature about pandemic politics, paying special attention to autocratization, democratic backsliding, civil society, electoral integrity, and electoral turnover to develop a four-stage explanatory framework to show how the pandemic affected the incumbents’ electoral fortunes and reveals key factors contributing to regime resilience and fragility between 2020 and 2023.To base our analysis on observational evidence, we gather data from PEI, ACLED, V-DEM, CIVICUS, Freedom House, OxCGRT, and opinion surveys, respectively and code electoral turnover as an election where the candidate of incumbency fails to secure a plurality of votes (presidential) or a plurality of seats (parliamentary). Our findings suggest that the pandemic elections were more autocracy-sustaining than democracy-subverting as the “autocracy advantage "thesis has served the autocrats in power invariably to deepen autocratization by turning lockdown into a new round of crackdown, whereas the interplay of civil society, electoral integrity, and the pandemic’s impact on voters’ preferences in democracies decided the electoral fortunes of the incumbents who presided over the crisis. The relative strengths of the illiberal, populist, anti-system movements, which sought to pave the way for backsliding and the pushbacks by civil society against backsliding and autocratization continue to provide valuable information about the prospects of democratic resilience and fragility.