Party Competition during the COVID-19 pandemic: politics as usual or crisis politics?

In March 2020, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic altered the world, becoming a challenge not only as a public health emergency but also as a social,economic, and political crisis. The measures implemented and also the high unpredictability of the crisis, increased insecurity among the population in terms ofhealth, finances, and labour among others. Population, therefore, relied on thepolitical elites to address their concerns. At the same time, political elites had tonavigate an unknown crisis, act and position themselves.

Taking advantage of the existing party competition and political responsiveness literature, I offer insights into how political parties behaved, in terms of both position and issue attention, during the first stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, I provide early evidence of how political parties in Europe reacted to the increasing subjective insecurity that the population worldwide experienced with the outbreak of the pandemic. To do so, I pose the following overall research question: How did political parties compete with each other during the COVID-19 pandemic? In times of disruption, we can expect political parties to
either adopt specific strategies targeted at the novel crisis or exhibit similar behaviour to normal times. Hence, the interest lies in whether the pandemic altered (‘crisis politics’) or not (‘politics as usual’) party competition patterns in Europe.

To evaluate the potential expectations, I first put into context the experience of insecurity from the electorate’s side (paper 1). Then I analyse the overall behaviour of parties in terms of issue attention (paper 2) to later focus on one specific issue (paper 3), labour. Finally, I take a key issue during the pandemic, the tradeoff between health and the economy, to study how congruent were political parties with the electorate (paper 4). 

The results of the dissertation indicate that insecurity is unequally distributed and that therefore the behaviour of political elites is crucial to alleviate this setting, especially in periods of crisis. Focusing on the behaviour of parties, the findings suggest that they did exhibit a more responsive role towards the general public as strategies overall differed from non-turbulent times. However, differences not only across countries but most interestingly across party families were identified. Some parties were more likely to respond following the preferences of the electorate than others. Moreover, some of these differences (e.g. radical right and the labour issue) refute established literature beliefs. The results of this dissertation have important implications not only in terms of the understanding of party competition behaviour but most importantly in terms of responsiveness and democracy functioning for both turbulent and routinary times.