engleski

Covid-19 Pandemic and Democracy in European Union

According to numerous international reports dealing with various dimensions of economic freedoms and democracy, the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly deteriorated democracy and freedom all over the world. Specifically, under the umbrella of a fight against the pandemic, governments very often disrupted elections, suppressed their critics and/or the media, while also several populist and extremist parties started to appear throughout the countries. The main goal of this paper is to investigate how were the key elements that make a functioning democracy, influenced by the pandemic in the European Union countries. These include, among others, free and fair elections, rule of law, an independent judiciary, representative institutions, free media, participatory engagement of citizens, etc. The goal will be achieved using secondary data such as the data offered by V-DEM, Freedom House, Government Response Stringency Index, World Bank… Also, we evaluate the degree of democratic standards violations from the governments within the policies that were designed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The data that will be used for this part of the research are the ones provided within the Pandemic Backsliding Project which gives information regarding the government emergency measures to the Covid-19 pandemic in individual countries, addressing whether state response affects not only the existing overall quality of democracy within the country but also its long-term perspective.

COVID-19 ; democracy ; European Union ; stringency index

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