Five Years Later: How the Pandemic Facilitated the Personalization of Power

Why did the pandemic lead you to research the personalisation of power phenomenon? 

Emilia Arellano: When the COVID-19 pandemic erupted five years ago, fears grew that related emergency measures would lead to excessive power concentration and increased trends of autocratisation. The pandemic was an ideal context for studying a phenomenon like personalisation. If not during a global crisis that challenged political decision-making and its enforcement, when would personalisation attempts become more evident? As governments implemented stay-at-home orders, lockdowns, quarantines, curfews, and restrictions on movement that limited civil liberties and rights, the pandemic created a window of opportunity for chief executives to strengthen their power, particularly in the Global South, where checks and balances have historically been weaker. 

What exactly do you mean by “executive personalisation”?  

Emilia: Personalisation of executive power – or “PEXP” for short – may take place in both democratic and autocratic regimes. It refers to the process by which the chief executive’s power over government decision-making increases at the expense of other political actors. This concept, which we refined and operationalised within the project, highlights the political agency that leads to the concentration of power in the hands of the chief executive or, in other words, the individual holding the highest position in government.  

How does personalisation arise?  

Emilia: We distinguish between its occurrence across two dimensions of power: by increasing authority and by weaking oversight, respectively. In the first case, the chief executive personalises power by increasing their leverage over the decision-making process. In the second scenario, personalisation is more about the chief executive weakening the checks and balances that monitor and constrain how government decisions are made and carried out.   

We propose three ways (or “mechanisms”) through which the chief executive can personalise power: First, they can appoint loyalists to key institutions to consolidate control and weaken constraints. Second, they can tinker with institutions and modify rules to expand authority or bypass oversight. Third, they may also resort to coercion – using violence, or threats thereof – to suppress opposition and strengthen control.  

In which countries are you studying personalisation under COVID-19?   

Emilia:  We selected 32 countries across four world regions, sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa, and included examples from four different regime types: closed autocracies; electoral autocracies; electoral democracies; and, liberal democracies. This allows us to balance the goal of studying personalisation across a wide range of different institutional settings and parts of the world, with the possibility to analyse each of these cases in depth.   

What did you discover? Was there indeed a personalisation of power during the pandemic?

Emilia: Yes, PEXP was widespread under the condition of COVID-19 – and we found it across various political systems and world regions. We recorded a total of 379 individual episodes in the 32 countries in which chief executives assumed greater decision-making authority or scaled back checks and balances. This was particularly pronounced regarding the first dimension of authority, as many chief executives appointed loyalists to bureaucratic positions with key decision-making power. In Ghana, Sri Lanka, and South Korea, for example, leaders created agencies and appointed executive loyalists to centralise power over pandemic-related policy decisions. 

In which countries was PEXP of the highest intensity? 

Emilia: The scale of the phenomenon varied widely across the examined countries. Cuba saw no episodes while in Taiwan we registered only two such attempts at personalisation. Several countries saw fewer than six episodes, including Algeria, Costa Rica, and Uruguay. In contrast, five others – China, Kenya, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka – accounted for 41 per cent of all recorded PEXP episodes. This indicates significant variation in how leaders dealt with the global health crisis. We have created an online map allowing the user to explore every PEXP episode in detail: COVID-19 and Executive Personalization in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Latin America and the MENA Region: A Dashboard.  

Were attempts at personalisation seen under all examined regime types?  

Emilia: Vulnerability to the personalisation of power does not seem to have been universal across the board. The liberal democracies in our sample saw the fewest PEXP episodes (44), while autocracies (78) and electoral autocracies (87) bore witness to higher numbers thereof. Electoral democracies (170) were the most affected hereby, largely driven by occurrences in Mexico, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, which together accounted for over half of all recorded episodes as regards this latter regime type – highlighting how prone these less institutionalised contexts are to PEXP attempts.  

Where PEXP episodes transpired, are the governments involved now more personalised than previously?   

Emilia: We have learnt so far that a broad expansion of chief executives’ power took place during the pandemic years. This occurred mostly in 2020, the first, with 144 personalisation episodes witnessed in total. The number thereof declined in subsequent years. This suggests that COVID-19’s early stages provided a key window of opportunity for executives to increase their power, although personalisation continued throughout this global health crisis. We are still investigating the extent to which these actions remain pertinent today, and with what consequences. What we can say, however, is that the “strongman” (yes, it was mostly men who tried to expand their personal power during the pandemic) reducing constraints and abusing weak institutions is also the most common type of autocratisation seen these days. This suggests close overlap between personalisation, democratic erosion, and the hardening of authoritarianism – at least in the countries we studied.  

The project “COVID-19 and Executive Personalization in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Latin America and the MENA Region” is conducted by three principal investigators: David Kuehn from the GIGA Institute for Asian Studies, Mariana Llanos from the GIGA Institute for Latin American Studies, and Thomas Richter from the GIGA Institute for Middle East Studies. The project team is completed by two other colleagues, Dr. Martin Acheampong and Emilia Arellano, as well as a number of research assistants. Funding is generously provided by the German Research Foundation.