Democratic Resilience And The Challenges Of The Post-Covid Era

The COVID-19 pandemic has generated unprecedented challenges for policymakers around the world – from public health to economy - exceptional in both scale and degree of interconnection. In addition, emerging, as well as established democracies, are struggling to maintain the quality of their institutions. Given the likelihood of the similar interlinked, complex crises in the future, democratic resilience, as the capacity of a democratic system to prevent substantial deterioration in the quality of democratic institutions and practices in the face of internal and external disturbances, is gaining increasing attention. National policymakers should prepare their countries to adapt and recover from such complex shocks. In other words, they must try to build resilience. This paper addresses consequences of COVID-19 pandemic on democracy in Serbia. We will analyze immediate effects of COVID-19 and speculate on the long-term effects on support for democratic institutions and principles. Using the indices of the quality of democratic institutions from the renowned international institutions, our goal is to assess the main challenges and sources of democratic resilience in Serbia. We will use the Merkel-Luhrmann “four-level approach” to democratic resilience in order to identify the most vulnerable and resilient parts of democratic system in Serbia. The results of our research will point out to pro-democratic policy measures, necessary for strengthening democratic resilience.