What is the association between partisanship, individual views and behaviours towards the pandemic? This research note explores this question empirically using two datasets collected before and during the Covid‐19 pandemic: a daily survey covering nearly 100,000 individuals and county level mobility matched to UK 2019 general election results. At the individual level, our findings show that partisanship is strongly correlated with differences in both views and behaviours. Conservative voters were less likely to perceive Covid‐19 as dangerous and less likely to stay home during the national lockdown. At the county level, the effect of the national lockdown on mobility was negative and statistically significant only in less Conservative counties. Thus, partisanship is associated with different individual views and behaviours towards the pandemic even when there is broad consensus among the main political parties and the government about the nature of a public health problem and the appropriate policy response.

As countries around the world went into lockdown, we turned to 32 leading scholars working on different aspects of democracy and asked them what they think about how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted democracy. In this article, we synthesize the reflections of these scholars and present five key insights about the prospects and challenges of enacting democracy both during and after the pandemic: (1) COVID-19 has had corrosive effects on already endangered democratic institutions, (2) COVID-19 has revealed alternative possibilities for democratic politics in the state of emergency, (3) COVID-19 has amplified the inequalities and injustices within democracies, (4) COVID-19 has demonstrated the need for institutional infrastructure for prolonged solidarity, and (5) COVID-19 has highlighted the predominance of the nation-state and its limitations. Collectively, these insights open up important normative and practical questions about what democracy should look like in the face of an emergency and what we might expect it to achieve under such circumstances.

That the present moment ties multiple crises together—not least because each is a future of pasts that wound(ed) through each other—must be factored into our intercessions and visions. If every crisis is also a call to order, then what order, old or new, does the pandemic call us to? Its literality provokes us to keep both the pan and the demos in sight, just as they are being extinguished through borders, disease, poverty, insecurity, hatred, and disposability in the global postcolony. We are asked to remember that capital and colony are inseparable, that the nation-state is too suspicious a source of comfort, that the eroding claims of citizenship across the postcolonial and post-democratic fascist failed states are instructive and prophetic, and that the assumptions of place and movement in our frames of the democratic political need revisiting.

This article provides a new perspective on EU exit as an exemplary form of disruptive dissensus or extreme Euroscepticism by examining how it is shaped by people’s attitudes towards the Union’s actions during the COVID-19 pandemic. We test how the dissatisfaction about how the EU handled the pandemic limited the trust in how it would manage it in the future, and influences a preference to exit the EU. We use a multi-level statistical model which combines individual-level data from a Eurobarometer survey and country-level characteristics from all 27 EU member states. The results indicate that disruptive dissensus is linked to both the retrospective and prospective attitudes towards the EU policy initiatives, even when controlling for the severity of the pandemic as well as the populists in government at the country level. We also find that the link between specific and diffuse support at the EU level holds during crises.

That effective leadership is crucial during global emergencies is uncontested. However what that leadership looks like, and how it plays out in different contexts is less straightforward. In representative democracy, diversity is considered to be a key element for true representation of the society. In addition, previous research has unequivocally demonstrated the positive impacts of gender equality in leadership. The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare some of the real world implications of gender inequalities in the leadership context. In this article, we examine the differential impacts of COVID-19 on women, and reflect on potential pathways for women's active participation.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had devastating effects across the world, yet different countries have had varying degrees of success in their attempts to manage it. One of the reasons behind the different outcomes observed so far lies in the strengths and weaknesses of different governance arrangements leveraged to tackle the crisis. In this article we examine what we can learn about the operational capacity of different democracies through their early responses to the crisis. We provide a framework of four positive qualities of multilevel governance that might lead to greater chances of positive practical outcomes and present an illustrative case study of the experiences of Switzerland and the United Kingdom (UK). We conclude with some areas for further research and investigation.

The response to the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed how public health decisions in mass liberal democracies always reflect a political trade-off between protecting privileged groups and leaving more marginalized groups precariously exposed. Examining the “political epidemiology” of COVID-19, I focus on the ways that the lives and well-being of children are sacrificed to secure adult interests. I argue that in our efforts to protect older adults we have endangered children and abandoned the future of today's youth. This, I conclude, is indicative of a liberal preoccupation with adults and adult forms of agency, a defect that can only be adequately challenged by working toward more robust forms of democratic inclusion that include children and youth.

The COVID-19 pandemic raises questions about the future of democracy and civil society. Some recent predictions seem to use the suffering to score points in ongoing political arguments. As a better example of how to describe the future during a crisis, I cite the prophetic voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. King does not merely predict: he calls for action, joins the action, and makes himself responsible for its success or failure. With these cautions about prediction in mind, I venture two that may guide immediate responses. First, communities may erect or strengthen unjustifiable barriers to outsiders, because boundaries enhance collective action. Second, although the pandemic may not directly change civic behavior, an economic recession will bankrupt some organizations through which people engage.

In this paper, we leverage newly available rich administrative data to study the heterogeneous evolution of fertility and newborn health during the pandemic. We focus on Tuscany, a representative region of Italy, which was one of the first countries to experience the severe impact of the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020. Our findings indicate a decline in the number of births relative to the pre-pandemic trend in late 2020 and early 2021, roughly nine to twelve months after the pandemic onset. However, starting in March 2021, birth numbers consistently exceeded the pre-pandemic trend, resulting in a cumulative “baby bump” compared to the counterfactual scenario. This aggregate increase conceals significant heterogeneity across sociodemographic groups, with positive deviations entirely driven by native, educated, and employed parents. During the same period, newborn health indicators showed no signs of deterioration and, if anything, slightly improved.

This paper draws upon the theoretical literature on migration policy and health, and empirical data on three European states with differing welfare models – Sweden (social democrat), France (conservative), and the United Kingdom (liberal) – during Covid-19, to highlight the often hidden and contradictory politics through which refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented migrants were forced to navigate during the most uncertain period of the pandemic. Although migrants’ treatment during Covid-19 was generally better in Sweden with a social democrat welfare tradition, we see migration management priorities greatly undermining the extent to which welfare systems function overall for the benefit of population health. Furthermore, Sweden’s recent political shift to the right exacerbates those negative tendencies. As the paper shows, there was considerable effort by civil society and local government to fill the gap where national governments failed to protect this group, stepping in to provide health information, and support.

This essay explores central aspects of the relationship between money and national health policy from the passage of Medicare in 1965 to the present, including the two most sweeping attempts at system reinvention during that period: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA), and the failed Health Security Act of the early 1990s. Its point is not that ethical professionalism has prevailed, though it survives on the skill and dedication of nurses, physicians, and other health care workers. Rather, its point is that one should not criticize the morality of change without interrogating the morality of the status quo. In the 1990s, Jerome Kassirer wrote that “a system in which there is no equity is, in fact, already unethical.” The same can be said for a system that overfunds medical care and underfunds other essential social investments, including education. A system that, moreover, cannot be justified by the limited morality of competition in the marketplace because it does not — and could not absent radical change — perform as a functioning market would. In terms of robust market competition with its winners and losers, U.S. health care has been, at worst, a sheep in wolf’s clothing.