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Pandemic Politics, Vaccine Polities: Comparing Outbreaks, Eras, and Geographies

Thu, September 30, 8:00 to 9:30am PDT (8:00 to 9:30am PDT), TBA

Session Submission Type: In-Person Full Paper Panel

Session Description

COVID-19 has made clear how deeply political factors drive each element of the response to disease outbreaks—from initial public health surveillance to the use of non-pharmaceutical interventions like lockdowns to the creation and distribution of vaccines. The COVID-19 pandemic is far from unique on this front. Cross-national differences in political contexts have long interacted with global power structures during disease outbreaks to produce highly uneven impacts and outcomes between and within countries. This panel explores the comparative and global politics of pandemics—the concurrent outbreak of an infectious disease across many countries. As they occur, biological phenomena uniquely expose political phenomena when simultaneous exposure to disease sparks social and government responses, allowing exploration of some striking similarities and glaring divergences. This panel takes a comparative approach across multiple axes—comparing across countries, time periods, and pandemics. Which theories help explain variation in policy choice and political reaction between countries faced with the same deadly disease? What explains differential public resistance to similar policies across sub-national and national units? How does polarization and inequality explain responsiveness of governments to a rapidly spreading virus? What political factors drive differences in the interpretation of science and risk? These and other questions are explored in papers that look at pandemics ranging from Smallpox in the 19th Century to HIV in the late 20th/early 21st Century to the most recent decade’s pandemics of Ebola, Zika, and COVID-19. Prerna Singh looks at divergent popular responses to the world’s first true vaccine (against Smallpox) and applies a historical institutionalist analysis to compare across subnational and national units of China and India. She shows how vaccines are less likely to be resisted if they are ideationally and institutionally embedded, which she links back to contemporary COVID-19 politics. Kavanagh and Wenham consider the idea of capacity and why all the current measures of pandemic preparedness and “global health security” have failed to predict effectiveness of responses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking at examples from Africa, Asia, North America, and Europe across COVID-19, AIDS, and Zika they offer an alternative definition and model of “political capacity” for pandemic response. Willison, Singer and colleagues look at how the politics of credit and blame for disaster management intersect with elite party politics of a very polarized country, using SARS, H1N1, Ebola, and Zika in the United States to understand the politics of elite cueing and partisanship. Massard, Jarman, Greer and King explore cross-national variation in COVID-19 vaccination policies in places including Brazil, Russia, India, Brazil, Bahrain, Israel, the US and EU. Through these variations they explore a research agenda on the politics vaccines (how countries secure doses and the types of vaccines available for them) and vaccination (the political economy of allocation, territorial politics, and institutional legacies). Together these papers highlight understudied phenomena in comparative politics and add generalizable insights in public health politics and policy.

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