Civil Society and Subnational Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Americas

Session Submission Type: Virtual Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping state-society relationships around the world. Government and community responses vary drastically across the Americas, the region hardest hit by the pandemic by many measures. Some governments have ignored the pandemic and input from civil society while other governments have used social, economic, and health policy to recast broad national priorities. In some places, poverty has decreased and political participation has increased as governments embark on massive redistribution efforts. In others, poverty and inequality have skyrocketed as poor communities are largely left to fend for themselves. Protests have rocked the United States, Bolivia, Chile, Peru, and Argentina as populations clash over unpopular administrations and their policies. Venezuela, Mexico, and El Salvador have used emergency powers to support authoritarian projects and repress civil society under the guise of public safety. This panel brings together team science projects investigating civil society’s response to or role in the pandemic, as well as the pandemic’s impact on local actors across the Americas. Work by Cyril Bennouna, Agustina Giraudy, Eduardo Moncada, Eva Rios, Richard Snyder, and Paul Testa find that power struggles between the subnational and national administrations in the U.S., Mexico, and Brazil led to polarized and partisan pandemics. In Bolivia, civil society groups have organized prevention campaigns with local governments and organized protest movements against unpopular politicians, leading to crises of legitimacy that hampered local pandemic response, as Ximena Velasco Guachalla, Calla Hummel, Jami Nelson Nuñez and Carew Boulding document. In Brazil, civil society groups have innovated public health interventions where the national government has failed to act, as Rebecca Neaera Abers and Marisa von Bülow chart. Merike Blofield, Jennifer Pribble and Cecilia Giambruno evaluate the variation in social protection and redistribution across ten Latin American countries during the pandemic and what these patterns indicate about government responses to crisis. This panel explores the impact of the pandemic on state-society relationships, civil society organizations, and state-society innovations in responding to this global crisis.

Sub Unit

• Division 12: Comparative Politics of Developing Countries

Individual Presentations

• Explaining Subnational Responses to COVID-19 in Brazil, Mexico, and the U.S. - Cyril Bennouna; Agustina Giraudy, American University; Eduardo Moncada, Barnard College, Columbia University; Richard O. Snyder, Brown University; Paul Franz Testa, Brown University; Eva Rios, Brown University

• Protest, Political Crisis, and the Cost of Low Legitimacy During a Pandemic - V. Ximena Velasco Guachalla, University of Colorado Boulder; Calla Hummel, University of Miami; Jami Nelson-Nunez, The University of New Mexico; Carew E. Boulding, University of Colorado, Boulder

• A Crisis Within a Crisis: Social Movements, Extremism and the Pandemic in Brazil - Rebecca Neaera Abers, University of Brasilia; Marisa Von Bulow, University of Brasilia

• Explaining Social Protection in Times of Crisis: Latin America Since COVID - Merike Blofield, German Institute of Global and Area Studies; Jennifer Pribble, University of Richmond

Chair

• Carew E. Boulding University of Colorado, Boulder

Discussant

• Jennifer Cyr Universidad Torcuato di Tella