March 12th 2021
I attended the virtual By the People or For the People? Authoritarian vs. Democratic Responses to COVID webinar presented as part of the COMPAS Program on Covid-19. Richard Herrmann moderated a conversation between Jessica Chen Weiss, an associate professor of government at Cornell University, and David Stasavage, a professor in NYU’s Department of Politics. They discussed how different types of governments implemented different public health measures in response to COVID-19.
They said authoritarian regimes acted more decisively, implementing strict lockdowns like those in Wuhan. Meanwhile, democracies have more decentralized power, and therefore it makes it difficult to have a swift centralized response. Strategies were mixed, whether emergency powers were given out, or it was left to the localities to decide policies. For example in the United States, a national lockdown was never ordered, but separate states had stay-at-home orders at the beginning of the pandemic.
One part of the webinar I thought was particularly interesting was their observations of the immediate responses of China and the United States. In China, the government cracked down on conspiracy theories about the virus in the beginning, but that soon changed as conspiracy theories soon formed that the US military brought the virus to China. Meanwhile, the speakers felt the idea of a ‘wartime effort’ never stuck in the US when it came to fighting covid, but it did in the UK and China.
This event relates to I.A. because it discussed how different forms of government around the world impact how policies are implemented. Each country is unique in its governance structure, and a structure’s decisions will ultimately trickle down to impact the local people of the country.