Pesta Rakyat ditengah Krisis: Partisipasi Masyarakat Pada Pilkada Sebelum dan Pada Saat Pandemi Covid-19

This study aims to determine how public participation in the Pilkada before the Covid-19 Pandemic and during the Covid-19 Pandemic. Quoting Jean Jacques Rousseau's theory, democracy is a stage or a process that must be passed by a country in order to gain prosperity. One of the democracies in Indonesia is the Pilkada which is held in each region. However, since the Covid-19 Pandemic which has an impact on various sectors, it has made a significant difference to the implementation of Pilkada in each region. Changes in implementation conditions which of course have an impact on community participation are interesting things to study. In addition, based on the analysis of the VOSViewer software, research on comparative analysis of the Pilkada before and during the Covid-19 Pandemic has not been much researched. This research is a descriptive qualitative study with the help of data analysis software NVIVO 12 Plus. The results of this study indicate that there is a decrease in community participation in participating in Pildaka, both during the campaign period or at the time of voting at the TPS. Another thing that is the difference between Pilkada contestation before and after the Covid-19 Pandemic is the phenomenon of a single candidate in several regions in Indonesia, which rarely happened before this Pandemic