Political Data and Developments in 2020: Politics During a Global Pandemic

The year 2020 was the most disrupted year in politics since the 1992 launch of the Political Data Yearbook, which covered political data and developments in 1991. In December 2019, news emerged from China of a new respiratory virus infecting, hospitalizing and killing many otherwise healthy people. The world began to take significant note as January and February 2020 progressed, with the World Health Organization (WHO) finally declaring a pandemic on 11 March. The new virus, a novel coronavirus, was eventually named COVID-19 to distinguish it from other coronaviruses. How it spread was initially unclear, but the results were dramatic, beginning with the lockdown of Wuhan, the city of the first major outbreak, and other measures across China. How the pandemic developed, and the subsequent emergency measures imposed by governments, posed profound challenges to the conduct of democratic politics across the world in 2020. As the virus spread, Italy was the first European, and Political Data Yearbook, country badly hit. The Italian government declared several areas in the North of the country ‘red zones’ where movement was severely restricted, before Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte dramatically announced, in a televised address to Italians, a national lockdown on 10 March. Other countries followed suit. Spain called a State of Alarm on 14 March allowing for a lockdown until late July. France's initial lockdown was introduced on 17 March, lasting until 11 May. Australia and New Zealand both effectively closed their borders to international travel throughout the year, while travel restrictions were introduced in other countries. Towards the end of 2020, many countries reimposed lockdowns, as cases rose and new variants, notably the Delta variant, took hold. Lockdowns were not always a straightforward process, however. After a considerable amount of indecision, the UK announced its initial lockdown on 23 March, also by a national televised address by Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The delay in doing so has subsequently been argued to have cost many lives. In the United States, such decisions were left to the states, but in the face of a hostile President Donald Trump denying the seriousness of the public health situation. Federalism in Germany meant that the Bundestag and Chancellor Angela Merkel were reliant on leaders in the Länder to implement the necessary social distancing and lockdown measures. Sweden most obviously chose a different path, reliant upon recommendations and voluntary participation rather than legally imposed restrictions. Given the novelty of the virus and uncertainty about its spread, it was always likely to hit social, economic and political interaction hard. A key area where this has been the case has been in running elections. In addition to being central to the democratic process, elections are logistically complex and people-intensive to run. They require the mobilization of whole electorates, often many millions of people, on or around polling day. They involve many thousands more in campaigning for office, and in staffing both polling stations and election counts to help ensure everyone entitled to vote could do so, and have their vote tabulated accurately. With such numbers of people involved, the potential for increasing the spread of infections through electoral processes was an obvious public health threat. Most countries due to hold elections early in 2020 either made rapid changes to voting methods and processes or postponed their elections and rearranged them for later in the year (International IDEA, 2021; James & Alihodzic, 2020). Italy postponed a major national referendum and several subnational elections from late March until late September. At the end of March, Bavaria in Germany switched quickly and almost uniquely to an all-postal ballot for their second-round municipal elections. COVID mitigations could at times appear dramatic. An Israeli election early in the pandemic saw several fully medically supported polling stations with staff in full protective gear to enable COVID-infected isolating electors to vote. Where elections were held, the pandemic also led to changes to campaign activities. Although the US elections went ahead as scheduled with COVID-19 mitigations, the Joe Biden and Donald Trump camps campaigned very differently. Trump continued to hold in-person, mask-optional events. These have subsequently been associated with sizeable transmission effects (Bernheim et al., 2020). Candidate Biden initially campaigned online, before turning to socially distanced drive-in events for some Democratic rallies. Parliamentary procedures were changed, often at short notice, and justified by the need for urgency given the public health situation. In some places, COVID laws routinely underwent little or no scrutiny, with parliamentarians approving some unprecedented peacetime limitations on civil liberties and rights of association. Some institutions saw their activities move to a hybrid format, using now familiar, but then unfamiliar, platforms such as Microsoft Teams. Both houses of the otherwise tradition-bound UK Parliament enabled MPs and peers to join remotely, but with a small number sitting in-person. However, voting was very much in the hands of party managers who controlled party bloc votes in the House of Commons. Something similar happened in the Netherlands, formalizing party control of MPs’ votes. Spain's Chamber of Deputies appeared ahead of the game because it had already developed an app pre-pandemic to allow members to vote remotely when sick or on maternity leave. This allowed relatively quick adaptation to pandemic circumstances. A number of leaders ended up catching COVID during 2020. These included US President Donald Trump, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron and Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov. Both Trump and Johnson were hospitalized. In many countries, other Cabinet members also came down with the virus, leading to additional pressures upon governments during this unprecedented crisis. The pandemic saw states take on high levels of public spending as they intervened to support both their economies and their health services throughout 2020. The democratic regime remained mostly stable in most places. On the one hand, democracy was not thriving everywhere after years of decline in some countries; on the other hand, the baseline was (mostly) not eroded despite the pandemic restrictions. With regard to the latter, The Democracy Report 2021 raised concerns about restrictions imposed disproportionately on Roma communities in Slovakia and on refugee camps in Greece. The United States is singled out for government-sourced disinformation about the pandemic (Nazifa et al., 2021). In V-Dem's four-level classification scheme, 26 countries in the volume covering 2020 hold the top status as liberal democracies, while 10 – Lithuania, Malta, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Poland and Romania – are rated in the second category of electoral democracies. Slovakia recorded the most notable gain in V-Dem's liberal democracy score, arising because of the end of the dominance by Smer-SD in Slovak politics, as described in the country chapter. Only Hungary is classified as an electoral autocracy, a quantitative judgement borne out by political judgements in the real world: the country chapter describes how the European People's Party Group of the European Parliament prolonged its suspension of the governing Fidesz MEP because of anti-democratic practices. From a decade-long perspective, V-Dem rates Poland and Hungary as the top two autocratizing countries in the world (Coppedge et al., 2021). Our chapter on Poland highlights the irregular procedure they adopted to delay the 2020 presidential election, and describes other legal reforms that limit the independence of the judiciary. The chapter on Hungary identifies several democratic blemishes, including an overreaching pandemic-related state of emergency, the further consolidation of the media around government-based companies, and the passage of a constitutional amendment hostile to the rights of LGBTQ+ citizens. Economic performance contracted in all but one case in this volume, but the declines were highly variable. Standing out at the two extremes, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in Spain and the UK declined by more than 10 per cent, while Ireland managed growth above 2 per cent. As our chapter on Ireland reports, this is not to suggest that COVID-related hardships did not hit business and employment, compounding the pre-existing crisis of escalating housing prices. The rest of the county cases were distributed evenly between –1 per cent and –8 per cent growth (World Development Indicators, 2021). As noted above, elections were relatively rare in 2020 among the countries included in the yearbook. We report seven lower house elections, four upper house elections and four presidential elections. Regional elections haven taken place in four countries, and citizens of four countries voted in national referendums. Table 1 shows an overview of the elections and referendums that have taken place. The seven lower house elections of 2020 were split between continuity and change. In New Zealand, the Labour Party expanded their margin and achieved majority status. With that, they converted their government into a single-party majority Cabinet. The Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) expanded its plurality by a small amount. In Romania, the governing centre-right National Liberal Party expanded its seat share and formed another single-party minority government, but remained the second largest party in Parliament behind the Social Democrats. Elections in Israel yielded stasis in the left–right balance in the Knesset, and Likud as the plurality winner, and a close second by Blue and White. Lower house elections in Slovakia, Lithuania and the United States all resulted in losses by the governing party. Smer's domination of the Slovakia Parliament ended. In its place, a loosely structured party, Ordinary People and Independent Personalities, won a plurality. In Lithuania, the centre-right Homeland Union–Lithuanian Christian Democrats won the plurality, and in the United States electoral victory swung to the Democratic Party. Table 2 lists the changes in government and parliamentary composition that occurred during 2020, with a particular emphasis on changes in female representation in Parliament and government. In 2020, 14 new governments were formed in the following countries included in the Political Data Yearbook: Austria, Belgium, Croatia, France, Israel, Lithuania, Malta, New Zealand, Norway, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). In Croatia, Israel, Malta, New Zealand, Norway and Spain, the incumbent government regained political office. In a number of countries, government turnover between the left and the right took place. In Austria, Sebastian Kurz regained the Chancellery in a centre right/green government replacing the technocratic caretaker government. In Lithuania, the centre-right Šimonytė government took over from the left-wing government led by Skvernelis. The Slovakian left-wing government of Pellegrini gave way to the centre-right Cabinet led by Matovič. The representation of women in government and Parliament overall remained low across our selection of countries. In fact, the share of female ministers decreased slightly from an average of 31.8 per cent to 29.1 per cent. The number of female government officials, however, is subject to significant variation across countries. In some countries, gender parity in government was (almost) achieved: Austria, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Iceland, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. In Finland, France and Sweden, there was even a majority of female ministers. Yet, in other countries gender parity in government remains a chimera. The new Northern Cypriot government did not include any female ministers, and in Greece, Malta, Poland and Romania the share of female ministers was below 10 per cent. Overall, the representation of women in Parliament remained roughly stable at approximately 30 per cent compared with last year (Clark et al., 2020). In Finland, a majority of 55 per cent of the MPs are female. In the Swedish Riksdag and the New Zealand Parliament 48.7 per cent and 48.3 per cent of the MPs are female, respectively. In most other countries included in the Political Data Yearbook, female parliamentary representation is still well below 35 per cent. Overall, this year's Political Data Yearbook country chapters suggest that the equal representation of men and women in government and Parliament remains a challenge for our selection 37 countries. The election reports discuss the relevant parliamentary, presidential, regional and/or referenda elections that have taken place that year. Each country report consists of a Cabinet report and a Parliament report. If a country has seen multiple cabinets in office or multiple parliaments, for instance after a general election, multiple Cabinet/parliamentary reports are included. Significant changes to political parties are discussed in the political party report. Changes to the institutional design of a country's political system are addressed in the institutional change report. If a heading is not included, the theme in question was not relevant for the annual country report.

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