Sources of Government Approval During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Threat or Electoral Predispositions?

Rally-round-the-flag events are short-term boosts of government approval during crises, and the COVID-19 pandemic produced such an effect in many countries. But why did some people join the rally while others didn’t? Using public opinion data from Costa Rica, this paper tests two hypotheses: first, that threat increases government approval at the outbreak of the pandemic; second, that electoral predispositions shape approval. Results indicate that COVID-19 contagions, as a measure of the threat, are not associated with approval, while past voting patterns are. Positive assessments of the economy and the relief measures also predict higher support for the government. In brief, Costa Rica's rally-round-the-flag event did not overcome the partisan divisions or the ordinary drivers of approval.

State-level Citizen Response to COVID-19 Containment Measures in Brazil and Mexico

In Brazil and Mexico, presidents failed to take swift, national action to stop the spread of COVID-19. Instead, the burden of imposing and enforcing public health measures has largely fallen to subnational leaders, resulting in varied approaches within each country and conflicting messaging from elites. We likewise see variation in compliance with social distancing across subnational units. To explain this variation, we contend that citizen responses are driven both by the comprehensiveness of state policies and whether they take cues from national or subnational elites. We hypothesize that support for national and subnational elites, and the nature of the state-level policy response, affect citizen compliance with public health guidelines. In both countries, we find that support for the governor has an interactive relationship with policy response. In Brazil, support for the president is associated with lower compliance. In Mexico, this effect is not present. We argue that these distinct relationships are due to the different cues emerging from each leader.

Believe in me: Parties’ Strategies During a Pandemic, Evidence from Ecuador

There is a growing interest to evaluate the political aftermath of the pandemic. We study how parties attract voters under the redistributive pressure created by COVID-19, looking into the 2021 Ecuadorian elections. We classify the messages that candidates sent, evaluate if and how candidates used COVID-19 to mobilize voters, and assess how voters reacted to them. We followed 858 virtual events and gathered more than 1’575.000 tweets from candidates and their communities. We find that candidates did not place COVID-19 at the center of their strategies but used it to connect with symbolic messages about the capabilities of parties and candidates. Twitter users had a limited engagement with COVID-19-related content. These findings nuance our expectations of the pandemic. COVID-19 was only an element rather than the core of electoral strategies. Our empirical approach can be easily extended to other cases where in-person events are still limited.

Stigmatized Campaign Practices and the Gendered Dynamics of Electoral Viability

What happens when a traditional source of political capital becomes a health hazard? Stigmatized electoral practices, such as vote buying, are a double-edged sword: While these strategies may signal candidates’ electoral strength, they may also entail reputational costs. In normal times, street campaigns are a non-stigmatized electoral practice. During the Covid-19 pandemic, however, they imposed health risks. Employing data from a national survey experiment conducted in Brazil prior to the 2020 municipal elections ( N = 2025), we extend research on the employment of stigmatized campaigns and the gendered dynamics of electoral viability. We find that voters evaluate candidates who engage in face-to-face activities as less electorally viable and report lower intent to support them. These dynamics do not impact all candidates equally: Voters more harshly punish women candidates who conduct street campaigns than men, leading women to lose the advantage they have over men when both employ non-stigmatized campaign practices.

Governing a Pandemic: Assessing the Role of Collaboration on Latin American Responses to the COVID-19 Crisis

How do governments address complex, cross-sectoral problems, like the COVID-19 pandemic? Why were some Latin American countries more successful at containing the pandemic's most devastating health outcomes? We argue that national governments that were more collaborative in their response to COVID-19 were more successful in reducing death rates. Our original dataset offers a novel attempt to operationalise collaborative governance (CG). We undertake simple statistical tests to measure the relationship between CG and COVID-19-related mortality rates in Latin America. We then choose three case studies to assess whether collaboration was meaningful in practice. Initial evidence suggests governments that pursued CG were more effective at containing mortality rates early on in the pandemic. The collaboration helped to foster cooperation over resources; buy time to prepare for a potential case surge; and produce a unified message regarding what citizens should do to prevent viral spread.

Race and Campaign Resources: Candidate Identification Numbers in Brazil

Party elites may hinder racial and ethnic minorities from winning public office by withholding resources. Prior studies have explored the distribution of money, media access, and party-list positions. In Brazil, party elites provide each candidate with a unique identification number. Voters must enter their preferred candidate’s identification number into an electronic voting machine to register their support. In this article, we replicate and extend Bueno and Dunning’s (2017) analysis of candidate identification numbers. They conclude that party elites do not provide white candidates with superior identification numbers than non-whites. We contend that assessing intraparty variation is theoretically and methodologically warranted. Using party fixed effects, we find that party elites provide non-white candidates with worse identification numbers than whites. We demonstrate that our findings are generalisable using data from other elections. Moreover, we show that party elites also withhold advantageous numbers from women and political novices.

Brazil’s Stealth Military Intervention

Between 2016 and 2020, a group of activist generals successfully plotted the Brazilian military's gradual return to the political center stage with powers unseen since the dictatorship. They achieved this without formally breaking the law, suspending the democratic process or overthrowing the government. We call this a “stealth intervention,” an incremental yet systematic attempt to redesign politics without causing a rupture, that fits neither in the existing typology of coups nor in the literature on democratic backsliding. We argue that Brazil’ stealth intervention, built upon the military’s existing tutelary prerogatives and driven by an unreformed praetorian worldview that resurfaced amidst a sustained crisis of democracy, challenges the prevalent view of the armed forces as a reactive force that intervenes in civilian politics only when its institutional interests are threatened. Finally, we show that democratic backsliding in Brazil started under Bolsonaro’s predecessor, Michel Temer, and point to the generals’ understudied role in this process.

Do Non-State Actors Influence Climate Change Policy? Evidence from the Brazilian Nationally Determined Contributions for COP21

Participation in democratic regimes has been a central issue in foreign policy (FP) studies. This article seeks to contribute to the empirical discussion about FP participation through the analysis of the public consultation process conducted by the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs with non-state actors in the context of the preparations for the Paris Climate Agreement (2015). We employed automated text analysis using Python and R qualifying open responses submitted to the questionnaire launched at the first round of the consultations process and comparing them to the official document presented by Brazil establishing its own carbon emission targets. We found that the Brazilian academia members had a relevant influence on the content of the final document presented by Brazil, strengthening the literature on the importance of the epistemic community to environmental politics and raising new questions on the paths of foreign policy influence.

A Tale of Two Pandemics: Economic Inequality and Support for Containment Measures in Peru

Research suggests that the coronavirus pandemic disproportionately affected poor communities. However, relatively little is known about how this differential impact affected support for, and compliance with, COVID-19 lockdown policies. This article examines the relationship between socioeconomic inequalities and public opinion towards COVID-19 containment measures in Peru. Despite the strict quarantine measures adopted by the government of Peru, the country struggled to contain the spread of the disease. We designed and implemented a nationally representative survey in Peru and found that economically vulnerable sectors are more likely to oppose the quarantine and are more likely to defy the stay-at-home recommendations to leave home and go to work. Our contribution highlights that poor citizens’ housing and economic conditions can explain why the poor are more likely to react negatively to COVID-19 lockdown policies.