The Impact of Covid-19 on the Electoral Arena and Regime Change: Evidence from Europe and Africa

To the extent that the Covid-19 pandemic was a disruptive force that undermined governance across regimes, the global health crisis was said to have exacerbated democratic backsliding and emboldened autocratization. While a global trend towards backsliding has been widely perceived, this study is motivated by the observations that (a) there have been strong pushbacks among democracies against illiberal populism and (b) little has been done to study the resilience and/or fragility of autocratic regimes whose inherent weaknesses were exposed by the pandemic. With the help of a newly developed dataset covering elections and referendums across Europe and Africa at the national level in 2020 and 2021, the main contribution of the paper is two-fold: (1) to ascertain which factors mitigated the health and political risks posed by the pandemic irrespective of regime types in both regions, and (2) to take advantage of the most different systems design to shed light on not only the extent to which electoral integrity was adversely affected by the crisis, but also how European Union and African Union nations overwhelmed by the pandemic performed in their respective context.