What COVID Actually Proved About Democracy
The pandemic wasn’t a stress test. It was a warning.
Grüezi und Schöni Wiehnachte!
It’s nearly six years since the pandemic… what did we learn?
1. The Political Science Finding Nobody Wanted
The pandemic may have been a public health horror, but it gave political scientists something rare and precious: a real-time natural experiment in democratic governance under stress. Same virus, different systems and elite configurations.
The findings make uncomfortable reading for fans of democracy.
Every mechanism that we assumed worked to protect democratic governance – informed publics, retrospective accountability, rights as limits on state action – proved weaker than the theories predicted.
Populations that had spent generations telling themselves they were “uniquely liberty-loving” accepted restrictions that would have seemed unthinkable months earlier.
The subjective experience of compliance in Brisbane wasn’t meaningfully different from Beijing.
What actually prevented democracy from folding wasn’t popular resistance. It was elite self-restraint and institutional inertia.
The guardrails held – but not how we imagined.
2. Your Opinions Were Never Yours
The most robust finding concerns how publics formed their opinions about pandemic response.
In the United States, partisan divergence on COVID was not inevitable. Early in the crisis, Democrats and Republicans held pretty similar views.
The gap emerged as party leaders split – Trump downplaying the pandemic’s severity whilst Democratic governors emphasised restrictions. Voters simply followed their respective tribes.
Within weeks, your partisan affiliation predicted your COVID attitude more consistently than your age, education, location, news consumption, or local case counts.
This wasn't a rational disagreement about trade-offs. It was straightforward adoption of whatever positions group leaders signalled.
Partisanship predicted COVID responses more reliably than any other factor – from mask-wearing to policy support to emotional response.
Canada ran the control experiment. Party leaders maintained a united front on COVID – and the partisan gap vanished. Same virus. Different elite behaviour. Different public response.
The model fits. Citizens don’t weigh evidence and reach independent judgements. They absorb signals from trusted sources, filter out what doesn't fit, and assemble opinions on the spot from whatever's floating around.
The deliberative citizen is as imaginary as homo economicus.
3. The Documents Are Right There
Autocracies manipulate and bully. Democracies are supposed to inform and encourage. The UK kept unusually good records of how it blurred the lines.
The Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours (SPI-B) advised Britain’s government on how to secure public compliance.
On 22 March 2020 they recommended that:
“the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.”
The recommendation came with qualifications. Defenders stress them now; at the time, those implementing the policy ignored them.
SPI-B’s remit was to ensure that people did what epidemiologists had recommended – not to assess whether those measures were proportionate. A body that could not advise against restrictions could only advise on how to make them stick.
Behavioural scientists knew the risk profile wasn’t uniform – younger, healthier populations faced minimal personal danger.
The recommendation was to increase their fear anyway, to secure compliance through emotional manipulation rather than accurate risk communication.
When the Telegraph asked SPI-B psychologist Gavin Morgan for comment, he was blunt:
“Using fear smacks of totalitarianism. It’s not an ethical stance for any modern government.”
The strategy deployed fear, shame, and social disapproval – the techniques behavioural scientists categorise as “affect,” “ego,” and “norms.”
David Halpern, who sat on both SAGE and SPI-B, had previously argued that such techniques require public consent because they operate below conscious awareness. No consent was sought.
Democratic governments demonstrated that behavioural manipulation could achieve compliance rates authoritarian regimes would envy – without surveillance infrastructure or significant enforcement capacity.
4. What We Say, What We Do
Survey research during the pandemic revealed the gap between what people said they’d do – and what they actually did.
Asked if they’d self-isolate with symptoms, 70% said yes. Actual compliance – not leaving the house at all – was 42.5%. Asked if they’d get tested, 62% said yes. Only 18% did.
When people did break isolation, their justifications were fairly banal: shopping (21.5%); work (16%); mild symptoms (14.5%); boredom (12%); or to meet friends or family (11%).
This cuts against both libertarian and communitarian assumptions:
People claiming to value freedom accepted extraordinary restrictions with minimal resistance.
People claiming solidarity abandoned the elderly in care homes, informed on neighbours, and then broke isolation to buy non-essential goods.
Self-reported compliance in pandemic surveys turned out to be essentially worthless. As a BMJ study noted, “it is very difficult to identify non-compliance through survey research because claiming to follow the rules is socially desirable.
The political implications are bleak. Rights functioned as preferences to be traded, not lines that couldn’t be crossed.
People said they valued liberty, then – under pressure – revealed that they valued convenience more. And social approval most of all.
5. Authoritarianism Didn’t Even Work Better
Academics found democracy had eroded across 144 countries during COVID. But did tough times merit tough measures?
Their core finding:
Countries that violated democratic standards “fared no better than those adhering to democratic norms” in COVID outcomes.
The correlation between democratic violations and better COVID outcomes was statistically insignificant.
The trade-off governments invoked – give up rights to save lives – wasn’t there in the data. Emergency powers merely expanded executive capacity without improving performance.
In countries that were already-backsliding, the pandemic offered an easy justification for powers beyond what any rational response required.
So populist incumbents violated democratic norms significantly more often, and used the crisis to do what they’d wanted to do anyway.
6. Spin Dictators vs Spin Doctors
Research on “informational autocrats” shows that modern authoritarians prefer spin to coercion, and co-optation to repression.
They secure legitimacy by convincing the public they’re competent, not by terrorising citizens into submission. They prefer propaganda and the silence of informed elites to mass violence.
So the pandemic lesson isn’t for authoritarians. It already landed.
The lesson is for democracies. The operating assumptions in democratic theory were that liberal citizens had internalised rights as hard boundaries, that they would resist overreach instinctively, and possessed some natural immunity to manipulation. COVID demonstrated that this was – in the modern argot – “delulu.”
Western governments achieved comparable levels of compliance in weeks using behavioural science and crisis framing – without the decades of ideological infrastructure authoritarian regimes invest in.
Democratic institutions didn’t provide predicted resistance. Parliaments deferred, courts upheld restrictions, media amplified government messaging, opposition parties either supported restrictions or were marginalised as irresponsible.
7. So What Actually Protects Democracy?
If it isn’t an informed, vigilant, liberty-loving citizenry – and the evidence suggests it isn’t – what actually prevents democratic erosion?
Leaders choosing to play by the rules.
Institutions that slow things down.
Elites who disagree with each other loudly enough for voters to pick sides.
And the absence of a crisis big enough to justify suspending normal politics.
That’s it. That’s the list.
Democracy survives not because citizens guard it, but because no crisis has lasted long enough to expose how little they’d resist.
COVID was the test. Citizens proved manageable and the guardrails held – but only because elites chose to stop, not because anyone stopped them.
That’s not reassuring. It’s a warning.
Thanks for reading!
Happy holidays and all the best for 2026!
Adrian