State structures and interventions for acute infectious disease outbreaks: a comparative politics perspective
Date
2024
DOI
Authors
Version
OA Version
Citation
Abstract
Through three interconnected articles, my dissertation examines government responses to COVID-19 from the lens of state-society relations and political institutions. Extraordinary events and national emergencies such as war and pandemics help to amplify the existing state-society relations and accentuate how institutions structure the behaviors and expectations of political actors. Using large-N analyses based on revised and updated global datasets, Paper I investigates how political institutions affect the effectiveness of pandemic responses measured by excess mortality rates. The spatial autoregressive models suggest that among all countries, greater bureaucratic quality and higher degrees of liberal democracy predict lower excess mortality rates, and among electoral democracies, higher levels of institutionalized centripetalism are associated with lower excess mortality rates. Paper II examines how distinct institutional structures in mainland China and Hong Kong led to the divergence of nonpharmaceutical interventions after the surge of the Omicron variant. I argue that China’s authoritarian and Leninist institutions feature a high level of social control and a low level of social inclusion, which facilitated its unwavering pursuit of “zero COVID” in the form of total mobilization but contributed to the rising social instabilities and snap reopening in December 2022. In contrast, Hong Kong’s hybrid and Weberian institutions are characterized by a lower level of social control but a higher level of social inclusion, leading to an early desertion of “zero COVID” when the cost-effectiveness ratio of interventions increased. Paper III continues to focus on mainland China and Hong Kong. Based on surveys conducted between November 2022 and January 2023, the analyses suggest that both instrumental and normative assessment of NPIs motivates voluntary compliance through individuals’ psychological processes, and at the aggregate level, the government in mainland China has been more effective in bringing cognitive and behavioral changes in support of nonpharmaceutical interventions than its counterpart in Hong Kong.
Description
2024
License
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International