Abstract
Governments around the world responded to the COVID-19 pandemic in different ways but usually with reference to scientist- and expert-led advice. Since populism is often seen as anti-expert, many scholars expected governments with populist leadership to be wary of expert-led advisory councils and adopt a science-skeptic discourse during this crisis (Kavakli 2020; Brubaker 2021; Bayerlein et al., 2021; Naushirvanov et al., 2022). However, not all populists responded to the pandemic in the same way (Brubaker 2021). In contrast to some populist leaders such as Donald J. Trump in the United States and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who conformed to such expectations, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey were prominent right-wing populists that have not adopted a science-skeptic discourse or downplayed the COVID-19 pandemic. In this chapter, we argue that populist governments’ policy responses to COVID-19 have varied, and this variation is shaped by the complex interaction of social, political, and economic pressures they encounter and by their constituencies’ policy expectations. We unpack this argument by focusing on the cases of Turkey and Israel. The Netanyahu and Erdogan governments both adopted a proscience discourse, took the pandemic seriously, and avoided conspiracy theories in the implementation of protective policies during the first year of the pandemic. However, the economic crisis Turkey faced during the pandemic restricted the Erdogan government’s capabilities in implementing protective policies, whereas the more favorable economic situation in Israel allowed Netanyahu’s government to ramp up its protective policies without threatening the survival of the government. Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Trump, and Netanyahu, proscience and science-skeptic alike, all responded in ways consistent with their reelection objectives. This chapter contributes to the existing literature by introducing a striking yet undervalued variation in populist government behavior and discusses the limits of proscience populism with respect to contextual pressures.
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Notes
- 1.
It is important to note that we acknowledge the fact that there surely are political calculations behind Erdogan’s delegation of power to the minister of health. By delegating power, he also delegated possible blames for failure. He played it safe and tried to protect his positive image among his constituency by not being in the spotlight during the crisis.
- 2.
For exceptions to this generalization of proscience attitudes of Erdogan and Netanyahu, please see our last paragraph in the alternative explanations section.
- 3.
Populists are anti-elitist and anti-expert irrespective of their ideological position on the political spectrum. Examples of populist governments also lend support to the approach that ideology did not prove a strong predictor of populist governments’ pandemic response. We should also note that most populist incumbents during the height of the pandemic were right-wing. Among the few left-wing populist incumbents, some took the pandemic seriously (e.g., Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and Rodrigo Duterte in Philippines), while others downplayed it (Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua) (Meyer 2020).
- 4.
It is crucial to note that the partisan divide was there before the pandemic in terms of science skepticism and trust in experts, yet the COVID-19 pandemic widened the gap on many fronts due to the science-skeptic politics endorsed by former President Trump and the GOP. It should also be noted that the most radical and science-denialist portion of American society, Evangelicals, became increasingly important within the Republican Party over the years, and that also has had a major impact on the radical turn of the Republican Party. In the 1970s, Republicans were more confident about science than religion (O’Brien and Noy 2020).
- 5.
We should note that this can also be understood as a framing choice by the elite. Trump and Bolsonaro played the pandemic as a discussion of freedom versus tyranny of restrictions that are the protective policies, whereas Netanyahu and Erdogan framed it as a national security issue, where they need every one of their citizens to obey the rules like they have been required to do by their security-oriented states for decades.
- 6.
Another counterexample to our generalization of Erdogan’s and Netanyahu’s proscience attitude and discourse is the fact that both leaders organized rallies and endorsed public gatherings in closed quarters (for political and/or religious purposes) during the pandemic.
- 7.
For more information on the COVID-19 PPI dataset, please see Shvetsova et al. (2022).
- 8.
Despite Netanyahu’s tough rhetoric, on the ground, his response was tailored to his constituency’s needs (Waitzberg et al. 2020). Since thousands of Israeli students and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish families were returning to Israel from New York, his government could not close the border with the USA at a time in which the USA, and specifically New York City, was the epicenter of the pandemic. Further, during the Passover holiday, the same constituency considerations led Netanyahu and his team to a deliberate policy overreaction, enforcing a national curfew even though the epidemiological data pointed out that a differential response covering in particular Ultra-Orthodox localities, which were hotspots for the spread of the virus, should have been implemented (Maor et al. 2020). This tailored policy response had two purposes: to ease off the constituency pressure by prioritizing their needs over those of the country as a whole.
- 9.
Level of democracy is an important factor that we did not include in Tables 7.1 or 7.2. The literature suggests that, contrary to expectations, democracies did a better job at protecting their citizens than did nondemocracies (Shvetsova et al. 2020). Yet Freedom House ratings and Polity IV scores show that Israel (Freedom House: 76/100, Polity IV (2018): 6/10), the United States (83/100, 8/10), and Brazil (73/100, 8/10) are considered free and democratic, whereas Turkey (32/100, −4/10) is considered not free, which does not reflect its level of response. Therefore, we consider the national response to COVID-19 as not stemming from the level of political rights, civil liberties, or overall level of democracy in these four cases.
- 10.
See pp. 11–12 for more details of such exceptions.
- 11.
Please refer to our initial analysis and discussion on the institutional factors in this variation in the online appendix.
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Bayar, M.C., Seyis, D. (2023). Populist Responses to COVID-19: Turkey and Israel as Cases of Proscience Populism and the United States and Brazil as Examples of Science-Skeptic Populism. In: Shvetsova, O. (eds) Government Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30844-4_7
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