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Populists and the pandemic : how populists around the world responded to Covid-19 / Nils Ringe and Lucio Rennó -- The United States : Trump, populism, and the pandemic / Kenneth M. Roberts -- Mexico : a politically effective populist pandemic response / Nicolás de la Cerda and Cecilia Martinez-Gallardo -- Brazil : "we are all going to die one day" / Frederico Bertholini -- Argentina : Peronism and inclusionary populist adaptation to the pandemic / Germán Lodola and Luisina Perelmiter -- The United Kingdom : the pandemic and the tale of two populist parties / Tim Bale -- Spain : different populist responses with similar (and limited) outcomes / Carolina Plaza-Colodro and Nicolás Miranda Olivares -- Italy : the diverging strategies of the populist radical right during the pandemic / Lisa Zanotti and Carlos Meléndez -- Poland : when populists must manage crisis instead of performing it / Ben Stanley -- Hungary : creeping authoritarianism in the name of pandemic response / Agnes Batory -- Turkey : governing the unpredictable through market imperative / Evren Balta and Soli Özel -- Indonesia : from the pandemic crisis to democratic decline / Eunsook Jung -- India : the good, the bad, and the deadly consequences of India's pandemic response / Saloni Bhogale and Pavithra Suryanarayan -- The Philippines : penal populism and pandemic response / Paul D. Kenny and Ronald Holmes -- Russia : muddling through populism and the pandemic / Anton Shirikov, Valeriia Umanets and Yoshiko Herrera -- Nicaragua : populist performance and authoritarian practice during Covid-19 / Rachel A. Schwartz and Kai M. Thaler -- Venezuela : a populist legacy and authoritarian response / Caitlin Andrews-Lee -- Tanzania : narrating the eradication of Covid-19 / Dan Paget -- South Africa : from populist inertia to insurrection / Ryan Brunette and Benjamin Fogel -- France : balancing respectability and radicalization in a pandemic / Marta Lorimer and Ethan vanderWilden -- Germany : the Alternative for Germany in the Covid-19 pandemic / Marcel Lewandowsky, Christoph Leonhardt and Andreas Blätte -- Belgium : against the government and its parties, (not so much) with the people / Judith Sijstermans and Steven M. Van Hauwaert -- The Netherlands : divergent paths for the populist radical right / Sarah L. de Lange -- Conclusion / Nils Ringe, Lucio Rennó and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser.

Some claim that an erosion of democracy is occurring worldwide. There are also questions on the scope of the crisis, which countries are affected, and how to reverse it. The Covid-19 pandemic may have fostered disagreements, deepened rifts, and contributed to the definitive crystallisation of the crisis, but it may also have engendered more moderate and compliant attitudes given the need to unify around the response to common threat. We explore the current dilemmas of democracy in the Brazilian case, focusing on how regime legitimacy, authoritarian attitudes, and support for a populist, authoritarian leader interact and are affected by the pandemic, using public opinion data from 2018 to 2020. (JPLA/GIGA)

The study provides descriptive data on durations, attributes, and parliamentary activities in legislative processes at the level of individual law proposals. It examines all government proposals submitted to the Brazilian Congress between October 1988 and December 2012, tracing their legislative processes until the fall of 2015. The analysis revealed that legislators' activism to influence the content and outcome of policy proposals can account for much of the delays in the legislative process. However, substantial amounts of time also lapse without accompanying content-influencing legislative activism. Extensive procedural votes that occur in the Brazilian Congress suggest that legislative obstruction associated with political conflict between presidents and their own legislative coalitions and one between the government and opposition significantly contribute to legislative delay. Hence, political conflict is as important a source as policy disagreement in accounting for legislative delay.

In this paper we bring together institutional, contextual, and behavioral perspectives in a comprehensive model that explores determinants of executive and legislative approval based on economic performance in Brazil and Chile. Our main question is, do voters attribute responsibility for the state of the economy to their representatives in the Legislative Branch as they apparently do to officeholders in the Executive Branch? We search for answers to this question with an eye on how active the distinct branches of government are in economic policy-making and voters' levels of political sophistication. Our main hypothesis is that less sophisticated voters will blame politicians indiscriminately for the state of the economy, independent of how influential each branch of government is on economic policy. More sophisticated voters will better discern the role each branch plays in economic policy-making and will not blame representatives in the Legislative Branch for the state of the economy when Congress is not active in economic policy-making. The cases of Brazil and Chile under Cardoso and Lagos offer the perfect opportunity to test this hypothesis, which is confirmed by our data. (GIGA)

Partisan theories of political economy expect that bondholders will panic with the election of a left-wing presidential candidate. The latter seems to be what happened in Brazil in the 2002 presidential elections. However, quantitative analysis of perceptions of sovereign credit risk in Argentine, Brazilian, Mexican, and Venezuelan presidential elections from 1994 until 2007 shows no real evidence of a link between partisanship and perceptions of risk, even if the left-right divide is further broken down into left, center-left, center-right, right. Instead, international and domestic economic fundamentals have a stronger influence on risk evaluations. Qualitative analysis of the individual presidential elections shows the importance of policy uncertainty in explaining why certain electoral periods seemed more critical than others and how bondholders select between multiple equilibria. This research helps shift political analysis away from partisanship and more in the direction of policies and articulation.

AbstractThe relation between elections and the economy in Latin America might be understood by considering the agency of candidates and the issue of policy preference congruence between investors and voters. The preference congruence model proposed in this article highlights political risk in emerging markets. Certain risk features increase the role of candidate campaign rhetoric and investor preferences in elections. When politicians propose policies that can appease voters and investors, elections may have a limited effect on economic indicators, such as inflation. But when voter and investor priorities differ significantly, deterioration of economic indicators is more likely. Moreover, voter and investor congruence is more likely before stabilization, when an inverted Philips curve exists, as opposed to following stabilization, when a more traditional Philips curve emerges.