Abstract
Abstract In 2020, governments were faced with addressing the health crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, without certainty about what would work best to reduce the health crisis without ruining the economy. Through all the uncertainty, national governments based their responses to COVID-19 on beliefs and political ideas, which was reflected on the diversity of the responses: liberal, authoritarian, centralized, decentralized, transparent, or opaque. In this article we focus on one of these responses, populism, and seek to understand how populist beliefs drive bureaucratic actions taken by a populist government to handle the health crisis. We conducted a comparative case study between the Mexican populist federal government and the non-populist Jalisco state government. Our findings suggest that the administrative actions chosen by the Mexican populist government were based on negative beliefs towards expert scientific knowledge from outside the government; a disinterest in searching for more information from distant or unfamiliar sources; and a strengthening of flagship programs as the main way to address the upcoming economic crisis. We also found that the Mexican government shows a peculiar manifestation of populism, which we refer as downsizing populism. Our article advances our understanding about how populism may affect the form and function of bureaucracies.
Highlights
The 2020 COVID-19 health crisis caught off guard most governments around the world
We found in our data a pattern suggesting that, to some extent, the health crisis brought an opportunity for the Federal government to reassure its compromise against corruption and in favor of the vulnerable economic trades, which would be materialized through direct cash transfers
Regarding the implications of populism over public administration, we addressed this topic from a very specific angle; we observed the populist beliefs shaping the strategies to handle a health crisis characterized by uncertainty and an urgent need of government adaptation to the new circumstances
Summary
The 2020 COVID-19 health crisis caught off guard most governments around the world. “This is war,” said the French President Emmanuel Macron about facing the epidemics crisis; and we witnessed diverse ways in which governments waged this war. When uncertainty surrounds new or unexpected circumstances, organizations tend to rely on prior beliefs and their culture to make sense of the circumstances going on (Levitt & March, 1988; March & Olsen, 1975). The uncertainty emerged from this novel virus brought diversity of reactions from national governments, which reflected their differences in beliefs and political ideas to make sense of what would work best to face the health crisis without ruining the economy. The responses we observed can be classified in different ways, from liberal to authoritarian, from centralized to decentralized, from transparent to opaque (Cohen & Kupferschmidt, 2020). For example, banned travel from or to the province of Hubei (Kupferschmidt & Cohen, 2020); Taiwan privileged fast actions over border control and proactive testing of suspect cases (Wang, Ng & Brook, 2020); South Korea promoted massive testing of suspect cases (Park, Choi & Ko, 2020); while Sweden opted for moderate measures of self-isolation and testing to gradually develop “herd immunity” (The Economist, 2020)
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