Democracy, Capacity, and Coercion in Pandemic Response: COVID-19 in Comparative Political Perspective

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged governments around the world. It has also challenged conventional wisdom and empirical understandings in the comparative politics and policy of health. Three major questions present themselves: First, some of the countries considered to be the most prepared—having the greatest capacity for outbreak response—have failed to respond effectively to the pandemic. How should our understanding of capacity shift in light of COVID-19, and how can we incorporate political capacity into thinking about pandemic preparedness? Second, several of the mechanisms through which democracy has been shown to be beneficial for health have not traveled well to explain the performance of governments in this pandemic. Is there an authoritarian advantage in disease response? Third, after decades in which coercive public health measures have increasingly been considered counterproductive, COVID-19 has inspired widespread embrace of rigid lockdowns, isolation, and quarantine enforced by police. Will these measures prove effective in the long run and reshape public health thinking? This article explores some of these questions with emerging examples, even amid the pandemic when it is too soon to draw conclusions.

Analysis of COVID-19 burden, epidemiology and mitigation strategies in Muslim majority countries

“…Notwithstanding this limitation, our data do indicate that early imposition of non-pharmacological measures did impact the growth of COVID-19 infections, and epidemic curves have not indicated that strict imposition have led to superior outcomes. We recognize that these are early days and the best data on consequences may only emerge over time, but it is important to test the counterfactual scenarios through these natural experiments against analyses claiming the huge success of large-scale lockdowns and strict measures (27). At the time of writing, a few Muslim-majority countries were still witnessing a secondary rise in cases whereas in others the curve seemed to have flattened -all indicative of a clear lack of association with severe mitigation strategies such as curfews and lockdowns.…”

Pandemic, politics and pandemonium: political capacity and Singapore’s response to the Covid-19 crisis

“…This extractive and coercive form of political capacity is often deployed during an emergency or crisis, with the invoking of emergency powers often granting political leaders greater ability to extract and allocate resources during an emergency (Fisuno glu and Rooney 2020). As Kavanagh and Singh (2020) have shown, coercive measures, often exercised in autocratic or semi-authoritarian contexts, have proven to be highly effective in containing the Covid-19 outbreak. However, the extended use of coercive political capacity can result in an erosion of trust and inefficient government allocation of resources in the longer run (Fisuno glu and Rooney 2020; Kavanagh and Singh 2020).…”

“…Certainly, coercive means alone may not be sufficient for containing the Covid-19 outbreak. Citing the case of South Korea, Kavanagh and Singh (2020) argue that a combination of public healthcare measures with voluntary measures and behavioral nudges can be just as effective, if not more so, as coercive measures. They further argue that while coercive measures can bring short-term results, these may in the longer term serve to reduce trust instead, eroding the government's political capacity.…”

“…This can in turn erode overall political capacity in the long term. While coercive means have also been shown to be highly effective in managing the Covid-19 outbreak, especially in the cases of China, Singapore and South Korea (Kavanagh and Singh 2020;Woo 2020a), there may be longer term impacts on political trust in these countries.…”

“…In their recent work on Covid-19, Kavanagh and Singh have found that the countries which had previously been thought to possess high levels of capacity for outbreak response have paradoxically failed to respond effectively to the pandemic, with the United States and United Kingdom being cases in point (Kavanagh and Singh 2020). As Kavanagh and Singh have noted, "Strong infrastructure and "stability" are clearly not sufficient.…”