Panel 3 - Pandemic
11 November - 1600 CET
Chair:
Philipp Kerler (University of Zürich)
Presenters:
Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner (University of Virginia): Covid-19 in the Village: Citizens, State, and Hybrid Local Actors (Co-authored with Dyuti Saunik, University of Virginia)
This study examines the critical yet complex role played by local health workers in rural India's response to the Covid-19 pandemic. These predominantly female local government workers form the backbone of India's decentralized public health system. They occupy a unique "hybrid" position as both community members and government representatives – a status that we argue simultaneously empowers and burdens them, particularly during crises. Drawing on firsthand accounts from health workers and citizens (captured by a national network of citizen journalists), we explore how these hybrid local actors navigated expanded pandemic-related responsibilities amidst severe resource constraints and entrenched inequalities. We develop a theoretical framework that explains the capabilities of local health workers as a function of their institutional and social connections. Some were constrained by weak governmental support, others by limited narrow community ties, while many faced a "double constraint" of both. A notable minority, however, were "doubly empowered" by strong state linkages and broad community networks, enabling more effective and inclusive response to the pandemic. We argue that empowering hybrid local actors requires addressing both vertical and horizontal constraints simultaneously. Our theory and findings contribute to broader debates on local governance, policy implementation, and crisis response, revealing how emergencies amplify existing social, political, and economic inequalities, but also how local personnel – when supported by institutional and social ties – can mitigate patterns of neglect.
Lynette Ong (University of Toronto): Augmenting State Power: Repression Through Complicit Society
How do states repress society and minimize backlash at the same time? In this paper, I address this theoretical puzzle by proposing states' use of a strategy of repression through complicit society. I examine the roles of various brokers as complicit nonstate actors and the conditions under which they help to legitimate state repression. Notably, social brokers who draw on their social capital with network members to exercise social compulsion are the most effective in their jobs. By legitimating repression with social‒moral norms, they assuage the perception of policy imposition as state coercive acts and help to augment state power to penetrate society and elicit compliance from the masses accordingly. I illustrate these arguments drawing on case studies of the Chinese state’s gaining community consent to contentious urbanization and demolition projects, as well as the implementation of the Zero-Covid Policy. This paper contributes to the literatures on state power, repression, and brokerage.
Anjali Thomas (Georgia Institute of Technology): How Prior Citizen-State Engagement Shapes Resilience during Crises
Crises are known to disrupt the social and political contract between citizens and the state, disproportionately impacting marginalized communities. What is less well understood is whether prior experiences interfacing with local governing institutions shape political responsiveness during hard times. We argue that while crises generally disrupt the social contract between marginalized citizens and the state, prior experience with navigating government bureaucracies and petitioning elected representatives should increase the likelihood of responsiveness of state actors. We test this argument in the context of the migration shock that engulfed residents of Mumbai’s vast informal settlements during the pandemic, forcing widespread urban-to-rural out-migration during the lockdowns. We leverage a factorial field experiment implemented prior to the pandemic in Mumbai’s informal settlements. The experiment fielded two interventions: the first provided citizens with assistance with bureaucratic requirements involved with applying for a municipal water connection. The second assisted citizens with political coordination to mount collective pressure on government officials to demand piped water. Our findings show that households who received either or both interventions prior to the pandemic were more likely to contact bureaucratic and political actors during the crisis. Moreover, citizens assigned to the bureaucratic assistance intervention prior to the pandemic were more likely to elicit political responsiveness. However, neither intervention working separately or in combination increased citizens’ satisfaction with political actors’ responsiveness during the crisis. We interpret these results in the context of low state capacity during crises, with implications for how and when crises can strengthen citizen-state engagement in hard times.
