When the word “authoritarianism” is mentioned, most of us would conjure up the same picture – of a Stalinist society, or societies synonymous to what we have read in many literary works.
However, the question of whether the COVID-19 pandemic specifically normalised authoritarianism has cannot be reduced to questioning whether democracies turned totalitarian, nor whether emergency measures were justified. This essay will use “authoritarianism” as a political rationality structured by submission and conformity, operating within the governance structure we are familiar with. This essay will define “normalisation” as the broadening of the acceptance of the political rationality, through which the emergency measures appear legitimate and beneficial to society. This essay argues that the COVID-19 pandemic normalised authoritarianism at three interconnected levels: the subject, the population, and the institution. At the level of subjectivity, fear intensified conformity and rendered submission to authority rational. At the level of the population, biopolitical management of the population reduced life to statistical figures and desensitised people to such practices. At the level of governance, the increased use of technology and algorithms embedded more control in everyday life. Thus, the pandemic did not create authoritarianism but normalised it through expanding the conditions under which authoritarian rationalities could be understood as reasonable responses to crisis.
I.
Subject
The pandemic normalised authoritarianism at the level of the subject by aligning fear and uncertainty with psychological predispositions toward conformity, wherein a “fear of weakness” leads individuals to focus on distinctions of “strong-weak” (Adorno, 1950). What distinguishes this from ordinary governance was the basis on which it acquired legitimacy. Under COVID-19 conditions, governance was increasingly intensified and then justified through the characterisation of it being emergency measures, which bypassed multiple levels of scrutiny it would otherwise have had. In this sense, authoritarianism did not need to be enforced, as it felt “necessary”.
Passini demonstrates that this pandemic-related anxiety is caused by a shift in values. He suggests that pandemic related anxiety correlated with a shift toward what he terms as “conservative values”, particularly security and conformity, indicating that fear intensified the desire for social order and cohesion. Participants reported high levels of concern regarding Covid-19 (M=4.76 on a 7-point scale), while increased concern positively correlated with Right-Wing Authoritarian tendencies and support for stronger authority. Furthermore, individuals who deviated from pandemic norms became targets of “authoritarian aggression”, a “tendency to be on the lookout for and to punish those who violate accepted values” (Adorno, 1950). Wnuk et al.’s March 2020 Polish study found that “perceived lack of control, personal threat and RWA were positively correlated with support for surveillance technologies,” while endorsement of liberty was negatively correlated. The study also notes the rapid institutional expansion of surveillance alongside these tendencies; the Polish government introduced a quarantine-monitoring application using “geo-location and facial recognition algorithms,”which “became mandatory”.
Compliance, to a certain degree, exists within all communities, but the authoritarian dimension lies in the extent to which the conformity was moralised, while any voice of dissent was recast as harmful or illegitimate under the pandemic conditions. Adorno’s theory of “projectivity” further suggests this process: individuals who express anxiety about the level of control was marginalised, and constructed as sources of danger, justifying more regulation. In the context of COVID-19, this dynamic is visible in the projection of the unvaccinated or non-compliant as irresponsible. The pandemic therefore normalised authoritarianism by expanding the conditions under which surveillance appeared morally necessary responses to insecurity.
However, using the KSA-3 scale, which defines authoritarianism through measures of personality traits, Heller et al. found that authoritarian attitudes in Germany were lower in 2020 than in 2017. However, this does not undermine the argument that authoritarianism was normalised under COVID-19, as the normalisation of authoritarianism does not depend on a uniform shift. Rather, it concerns the expansion of the conditions under which surveillance become an acceptable response to crises. In this sense, authoritarianism is understood less as a fixed concept of totalitarian society, but rather a political rationality obfuscated within reasonable social behaviour.
II.
Population.
At the level of the population, the pandemic normalised authoritarianism by intensifying biopolitical and necropolitical forms of governance, rendering life itself calculable and unequal exposure to risk politically reasonable. Modern power operates through the “administration of bodies and the calculated management of life,” in which populations are governed as biological entities rather than as juridical subjects with rights (Foucault, 1990). The pandemic intensified this by reducing societies into statistics of infection rates, mortality figures, and risk categories, through which behaviour could be regulated in the name of collective survival. This relates to authoritarianism because political legitimacy increasingly derived not from democratic deliberation, but from the state’s claimed capacity to manage biological life itself. Under these conditions, interventions such as lockdowns and movement restrictions were rendered acceptable as necessary techniques for preserving life, thereby normalising the governance of populations through biological management.
This biopolitical framework was accompanied by a shift toward necropolitics, understood as the power to determine who may be exposed to death (Mmembe, 2003). Pandemic policies involved differential exposure to harm. Certain groups – the elderly and economically vulnerable populations – were more exposed to risk, as policy decisions meant some groups wellbeing was jettisoned for the benefit of another. However, this exposure operated less through explicit decisions than through a “state of acceptance,” (Sandset, 2021) in which unequal vulnerability becomes normalised as an ordinary condition of social life. The strategy worked on the assumption that some groups would be more at risk – and that this was acceptable to protect society as a whole. In this sense, necropolitical power functioned through rendering such outcomes expected, embedding unequal exposure within ordinary life. The Authoritarian significance of this development lay in the extent to which the unequal distribution of vulnerability became accepted as a legitimate object of administrative calculation, thereby normalising forms of authority grounded in the management of life and death.
In Italy, the pandemic produced the largest population-wide restraint of constitutional rights since the post-war republic (Passini, 2022). The crisis simultaneously created manifestations of nationalistic feelings (e.g. the display of flags), which fostered a sense of unity that made these restrictions more acceptable. This suggests that population-level governance was actively supported through the fostering of a collective identity within the social body, as individuals became willing to waive individual liberties in order to preserve social order. Authoritarian rationality, in this context, operated through the alignment of a collective identity with the objectives of governance.
This dynamic can be understood as “authoritarian pastoralism,” in which the state’s role as protector of the population is inseparable from its capacity to discipline and control it (Joseph,2025). During the pandemic, the state acted as a “pastoral shepherd,” dividing populations between the vulnerable and the irresponsible. The protection of the former justified the regulation of the latter, demonstrating how care and coercion functioned together: the obligation to “make live” legitimised the authority, and made it acceptable to regulate behaviour. In this way, liberal governance revealed an “authoritarian folding,” in which disciplinary powers became visible under conditions of crisis (Joseph, 2025). COVID-19 illustrated this folding through the expansion of behavioural regulations, all under the guise of public safety. The authoritarian significance of this development lay in revealing how liberal governance could suspend ordinary expectations of freedom when the preservation of the social body was presented as an overriding necessity.
However, the classification and management of populations are necessary components of public health governance, and their implementation varied significantly across contexts. Management of populations was never a new concept unique to the pandemic. However, it wasindeed normalised and made more ubiquitous. Thus, the pandemic expanded the conditions under which such practices were accepted as normal, rendering the governance of life – and the unequal distribution of risk – a legitimate and largely uncontested feature of political authority.
III. Governance.
At the level of governance, the pandemic normalised authoritarianism by reconfiguring the means through which it operates, embedding control within technocratic, administrative, and algorithmic systems that are less visible and less open to controversy. The COVID-19 pandemic made this logic unusually salient, as emergency rule operated alongside a dense network of public health guidance, data collection, and expert-led decision-making. Decisions affecting everyday life were legitimised through appeals to science and the advice of the “experts”, narrowing the space in which disagreement could appear well-founded in society. Crucially, this saw the emergence of a system of governance as an ensemble of expertise and administration. The decisive transformation was therefore procedural: coercive capacity was expanded through channels adjacent to formal government, where authority could be exercised without the same degree of political scrutiny.
This shift was reinforced by the logic of crisis urgency, in which decision-making is framed by a “there-is-no-alternative” (Herzog, 2021) rationale that elevates expert authority as the only legitimate basis for action. Under pandemic conditions, political disagreement was frequently displaced by appeals to science, and framed as a necessity, narrowing the space in which differing voices could appear legitimate. This dynamic aligns with Evgeny Morozov’s critique of “techno-solutionism,” whereby complex political problems are reframed as technical challenges to be optimised. Decisions were thus increasingly legitimised in terms of efficiency rather than being justified democratically, reconfiguring the relationship between citizens and the state by shifting authority toward a technocratic layer of governance.
As Wnuk et al. demonstrate, support for surveillance technologies during the pandemic was not strongly correlated with political views, suggesting that acceptance of these measures was not so much caused by political views and ideology than out of concern for safety. This indicates that governance was accepted as a technical part of life. This control also operated through the internalisation of behavioural expectations. Contemporary power functions psychopolitically, relying on the “subjects” to monitor themselves (Byung-Chul Han, 2017). Pandemic governance relied on self-regulation, as individuals adopted a routine in which they regulate and monitor themselves to quickly identify signs of disease, and this extended the reach of authority into everyday behaviour.
This process was further intensified by the rise of algorithmic forms of governance. “Algorithmic governmentality” (Rouvroy et al., 2013) operates by collecting data traces and constructing “statistical doubles” that enable the pre-emptive steering of behaviour. During the pandemic, digital resources, like tracking applications, allow for a more continuous, slow and steady form of intervention, in which the “subject” does not notice outright. Governance thus shaped from responding to people’s behaviour to shaping it, reducing the scope for conscious political resistance.
The result was the consolidation of a new techno-administrative layer of governance, comprising experts and data systems capable of shaping behaviour without the accountability of formal political structures. This new source of authority is less open to contestation and is easier to normalise and harder to remove from everyday life.
Conclusion
The COVID-19 pandemic normalised authoritarianism as a political rationality by expanding the conditions under which it appears intelligible, necessary, and even desirable. At the level of the subject, fear aligned with psychological dispositions, rendering submission to authority a rational and morally framed response to crisis. At the level of the population, biopolitical and necropolitical forms of governance made life calculable and unequal exposure acceptable, embedding the management of risk and vulnerability within ordinary political reasoning. At the level of governance, authority was reconfigured through technocratic, administrative, and algorithmic infrastructures that displaced political contestation and presented control as a technical necessity.
Crucially, these transformations operated through internalisation, acceptance, and depoliticisation. Authoritarianism became normalised when surveillance, compliance, and unequal exposure to harm were understood as reasonable responses to collective insecurity. While these developments were uneven and often justified within the context of public health, their broader significance lies in how they reshaped the boundaries of what is considered legitimate political action. The pandemic therefore did not create authoritarianism, but rendered it more difficult to recognise, as it became embedded within the ordinary functioning of governance and the everyday reasoning of subjects.
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