Take a novel disease with highly variable but sometimes lethal effects, particularly on the poor, the elderly, and the vulnerable. Note that the disease is highly transmissible, even by asymptomatic individuals, in common work and leisure contexts. Add the logic of exponential growth by which after a short time even well-functioning health systems can be quickly overwhelmed by those with severe forms of the disease (not to mention its devastating effects on poorly run systems), and it is easy to see why the COVID-19 pandemic has provided such a disruptive challenge to democratic governments.
In seeking to understand these challenges, Miguel Poiares Maduro and Paul W. Kahn have gathered a highly distinguished group of lawyers, political theorists, and political scientists to reflect on what the pandemic means for the functioning and future of democracy. The contributions take the form of reflective essays rather than research papers. That is not a criticism: one can learn much from intelligent people applying their minds to difficult political problems. However, the variety of responses does pose an organizational problem, which the editors have sought to solve by grouping the chapters into three categories: power, knowledge, and citizens. But because a number of the chapters span these topics, and others refuse the invitation to think about the future of democracy in the light of the pandemic, can the grouping be anything more than a presentational device?
One answer that can be offered runs as follows. Political theorists have long noted the distinction between being “in authority” by holding public office and being “an authority” qualified to make warranted assertions within a discipline of inquiry. In the pandemic, good democratic governance required a uniting of both types of authority. Public officials needed to exercise their authority well, from drawing on scientists and others to deploying their warranted claims. Moreover, there needed to be a social contract that legitimized these authorities to citizens. Most chapters address these themes.
Several contributors (including Roberto Gagarella, J. H. H. Weiler, and Susan Neiman) note the threats to the fundamental principles of constitutional democracy by the opportunity COVID-19 gave to authoritarian-inclined leaders, who could instrumentalize the pandemic by using the need for emergency powers to bolster their own power. The most striking figure in this regard is Viktor Orbán in Hungary, who bypassed the normal constitutional procedures for initiating a state of danger—the legal form of a state of emergency—by proposing a new law that gave him unlimited decree powers for the duration of the pandemic, a duration that he had the power to determine himself.
This case is most extensively discussed by Kim Lane Scheppele and David Pozen, who also note, in what is a highly innovative analysis, that this form of constitutional overreach can be contrasted with the constitutional underreach of Donald Trump in the United States and of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Both Trump and Bolsonaro failed to use the powers that were available to them to put in place scientifically advised public health measures. Instead, they pandered to their electoral base by siding with anti-public health protests and movements. Scheppele and Pozen suggest that such underreach is as much a danger to fundamental constitutional norms as overreach. We might say that those in authority should act with authority, including the authority of science.
Michael Ignatieff points out that for governments to follow the science meant, in effect, using epidemiology to legitimize a massive if temporary reduction in human freedoms. Even in the United Kingdom, France, and Canada, where the status of scientific advice was never under threat in the way it was with Trump and Bolsonaro, the science on offer was never simply technical advice, and the presence of scientists in press conferences and the like reinforced political authority with the authority of science. Those in political authority were buttressed by those with scientific authority.
In their introduction, Maduro and Kahn note that the pandemic broke at a time when populist movements had grown in democracies, building in part on a distrust of expertise as such. Although one feature of the pandemic was the pervading of everyday conversations by the sharing of epidemiological, viral, and modeling concepts in the mainstream and social media, this phenomenon coexisted with the mismatch between scientific evidence (what you can see) and everyday experience (what can be reasoned with).
That leads to the role of citizens in a democracy during a pandemic. Both Neil Walker and Susan Neiman draw attention to the forms of citizen collective action that contributed to public health goals. Walker sees compliance with lockdown measures as a form of widespread, if low cost, citizen participation. Neiman nicely puts on display some of her collection of “good news” stories from the pandemic, noting the many cases in which people volunteered time and resources to contribute to the public good. She sees this spontaneous collective action as leading to a wider undermining of the assumption of self-interest in political life, with positive implications for the future of democracy. These points are well taken, but the volume as a whole would have benefited from an analysis of how countervailing interests, including those of self-styled libertarians and anti-vaxxers, were able to solve their collective action problems when advancing their demands.
The book was produced during the height of the pandemic, before any vaccines had been discovered, before the election of President Biden, and before the sharp economic bounce-back in many countries that has led to fears of resurgent inflation. Inevitably, then, its half-life is likely to be short. Yet, this does not mean that some essays do not have lasting significance. In this category I would place Michael Ignatieff’s stand-out discussion of the principles of democratic leadership during the pandemic. In 15 deftly written pages, Ignatieff uses comparative evidence to interrogate and show the limits of four principles that supposedly form a responsible policy stance to manage the pandemic: go early and hard, follow the science, be transparent, and do what it takes. He illustrates in particular how citizens and political scientists evaluating the performance of their governments have to make subtle judgments of timing and comparability.
In addition to these analytical points, Ignatieff offers a broader political message, suggesting that the pandemic shows the need for years of hard political work to correct inequalities that inflict premature death on people of color and the poor. In this context, his conclusion is noteworthy: “The moment that has arrived is a reckoning not with our virtues or with our identities, but with our willingness to sustain a politics with strangers we need as allies, across the racial and class divide.” We might say it is a moment for governments to act with authority that is fully democratically legitimate and in the public interest.
