Unhealthy Populism: COVID-19 in Southeast Asia

Countries with effective institutions, high state capacity and democratic political systems are typically considered better equipped to manage public health emergencies (Wang et al., 2019). However, the experience of COVID-19 in Southeast Asia suggests that an exclusive focus on regime type and institutional capacity is problematic. Low-income, authoritarian countries such as Vietnam have been success stories, while countries with democratic institutions such as Indonesia, or highly functional bureaucracies such as Singapore, have struggled to break contagion patterns. These facts challenge arguments that any regime type is inherently better equipped to manage pandemics, and suggest the need for new perspectives to account for cross-country variation in responses to COVID-19.If not regime type, then what accounts for the variation in responses to COVID-19? Building on existing research, we argue that populist rhetoric weakens a country’s ability to address public health crises effectively. Such rhetoric shapes both state and societal responses to COVID-19. First, populist discourse erodes public trust in democratic institutions and (medical) expert knowledge. Anti-scientism and decreasing institutional trust compromise a government's ability to address public health challenges because they undermine social support for and compliance with policy measures designed to curb viral diffusion. Second, populism invites partisan polarization, thereby undermining the dynamics of accountability. Polarized voters are unlikely to punish incumbent politicians for their poor performance, thus allowing politicians to belittle the gravity of health crises or shift the blame to political opponents. This lowers the various actors’ incentives to implement stringent policies, to the detriment of public health (Backhaus et al., 2019). We will therefore focus on the key mechanisms through which populist politics may worsen the impact of infectious disease outbreaks. Drawing from this research team’s expertise in public health, survey methods, populism and Southeast Asian politics, we will investigate the validity of the above argument in six countries (Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam) that vary substantially in regime type, degree of populist politics and policy responses to COVID-19. We will conduct mass surveys to disentangle the relationship between populist attitudes and views toward the pandemic, and triangulate the survey data with qualitative interviews with health officials and other informed respondents.This project will make a substantive contribution to our understanding of public health governance in Southeast Asia and beyond by clarifying the role of political dynamics in general, and populism in particular, in developing social and public policy responses to infectious diseases.