Lockdown of expression: civic space restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic as a response to mass protests

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments across the globe implemented severe restrictions of civic freedoms to contain the spread of the virus. The global health emergency posed the risk of governments seizing the pandemic as a window of opportunity to curb (potential) challenges to their power, thereby reinforcing the ongoing, worldwide trend of shrinking civic spaces. In this article, we investigate whether and how governments used the pandemic as a justification to impose restrictions of freedom of expression. Drawing on the scholarship on the causes of civic space restrictions, we argue that governments responded to COVID-19 by curtailing the freedom of expression when they had faced significant contentious political challenges before the pandemic. Our results from a quantitative analysis indeed show that countries who experienced high levels of pro-democracy mobilization before the onset of the pandemic were more likely to see restrictions of the freedom of expression relative to countries with no or low levels of mobilization. Additional three brief case studies (Algeria, Bolivia and India) illustrate the process of how pre-pandemic mass protests fostered the im-position of restrictions on the freedom of expression during the pandemic.

在新冠疫情（COVID-19）大流行的第一年，全球各国政府为遏制病毒传播，实施了严格的公民自由限制措施。此次全球卫生紧急事件，存在各国政府借疫情作为契机，遏制（潜在的）对其权力的挑战的风险，进而加剧了全球范围内公民空间持续收缩的既有趋势。本文旨在探究各国政府是否、并以何种方式借疫情为借口，实施言论自由限制措施。本文借鉴公民空间限制成因的相关学术研究，提出论点：若政府在疫情前曾遭遇过显著的激烈政治挑战，则其会通过限制言论自由来应对新冠疫情。我们的定量分析结果确实证实：相较于疫情前亲民主动员水平较低或未发生该类动员的国家，疫情前经历过高水平亲民主动员的国家，更有可能实施言论自由限制措施。另有三项针对阿尔及利亚（Algeria）、玻利维亚（Bolivia）与印度（India）的简要案例研究，阐释了疫情前的大规模抗议如何促成了疫情期间言论自由限制措施的实施。