Shock the system: Emergency powers and political capacity

Abstract

States that grant their leaders extraordinary powers in times of emergency do so to protect the nation against dramatic shocks. Implicit in this choice is the assumption that the government will better retain its capacity when confronted with an emergency situation if the leader can invoke emergency powers. This remains an untested proposition. In this article, we challenge this assumption and argue that the relationship between emergency powers and political capacity depends on both the nature of the emergency itself and the type of capacity in question. We find that emergency powers better allow the government to extract resources from the public during periods of emergency. However, it is only in national political emergencies where these resources are well allocated. After extraterritorial emergencies, increased emergency power strength leads to inefficient government allocation. This suggests that emergency powers are not a panacea guarding against the ills of crisis.

Infrastructural state capacity in the digital age: What drives the performance of COVID‐19 tracing apps?

“…The COVID-19 pandemic has eloquently shown how much an administrative center's capacity to govern a crisis translates into saved lives. Crisis governance entails multiple capabilities, I G U R E 1 Trust in government and tracing apps' adoption rates some relying on more formal aspects (e.g., how policy responsibility is allocated), and others on more informal rules (e.g., how coordination and policy learning operate in practice) (Christensen et al 2016;Fisuno glu and Rooney 2020). It also relies on contingent factors (e.g., the type of crisis) and more importantly, on the deep-rooted governance foundations that determine response choices (Franco-Chuaire et al 2017).…”