True to Type? How Governance Traditions Shaped Responses to Covid-19 in China, Germany, UK, and USA

Abstract

In this chapter, we compare how China, Germany, the UK, and USA responded to Covid-19. We draw on publicly available documentation to describe how our four countries responded to Covid-19 through August 2020, which broadly covers the period of onset and initial lockdown, the introduction of complementary economic welfare packages, and the first relaxation of lockdown rules. These four purposefully chosen polities encompass four of the world’s largest economies by GDP but have distinctive governance traditions that cut across each other in three ways that are likely to be consequential for their Covid responses. First, they vary according to norms of state intervention, which shape how far states can go in supressing the pandemic: the USA and Germany have strong constitutional guarantees against state interference in the rights of citizens and businesses; China’s authoritarianism is tempered by a paternalistic tradition emphasising the state’s protective duties to the people, while the British state’s relationship with civil society is shaped by an ad hoc mix of convention, law, and parliamentary politics. Second, those countries’ state structures vary, which can influence their capacity to respond to Covid with sufficient consistency and granularity: while the USA and Germany are federal states, China and the UK are unitary. Finally, the countries also differ in their traditional styles of policymaking, which can shape the coherence and complementarity of responses: while the USA and UK have pluralist policy styles, German policymaking is corporatist, and China is governed in a style of ‘fragmented authoritarianism’.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

—Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy