Good Citizens in Exceptional Times: The Role of State and Regime Legitimacy

• In Event: Historical Approaches to Comparative Politics

Abstract

Numerous scholars have identified a persistent, time-varying impact of history on current political attitudes. We study how perceived state and regime legitimacy may impact citizens’ willingness to rally-around-the-flag, in times of crisis. We exploit the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic as life-threatening shock which suddenly increased the need of immediate state intervention. We use an original, representative panel survey fielded in Spain right before the outburst of Covid-19 to test whether the pandemic spurred conflictual reactions in areas where the democratic regime was perceived as less legitimate. At a time in which the legitimacy of the Spanish state and of the post-Francoist regime became increasingly contested, the country faced a sudden threat: the outburst of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. This life-threatening shock suddenly raised the visibility of the state, and of its democratically-elected rulers, in the day-to-day life of citizens. The executive, building on nationalist sentiments, asked for citizens' full cooperation and compliance with the state of emergency. This prompted a somewhat paradoxical regime-driven technocratic shift, where the political leader act as a guarantor and spokesperson of the decisions taken by a group of experts. Empirically, we identify changes in individuals’ technocratic attitudes to by estimating individual diff-in-diff panel models with individual fixed effects that exploit geographical variation in state and regime legitimacy. We find evidence of a lower technocratic response – lower pandemic rallying – during the early stages of the pandemic in areas less hostile to Francoism in which the contemporaneous Spanish democratic regime is perceived as less legitimate. This finding is corroborated by historical contextual proxies for state legitimacy from the late-XIX and early-XX centuries in Spain. Overall, we provide evidence that that regime and state legitimacy are important determinants of the incumbent’s ability to secure the support of citizens in exceptional times.

Author

• Francesc Amat, University of Barcelona