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Separation of power and expertise: Evidence of the tyranny of experts in Sweden's COVID‐19 responses
Abstract
Whereas most countries in the COVID‐19 pandemic imposed shutdowns and curfews to mitigate the contagion, Sweden uniquely pursued a more voluntarist approach. In this article, our interest is primarily on how and why Sweden's approach to the pandemic was so unique. There are two parts to this research question: (1) why did virtually all other nations follow a radical lockdown protocol despite limited evidence to its effectiveness and (2) why did Sweden not follow this same protocol despite strong political pressures? The answers to these questions lie within typical government technocracy versus Sweden's constitutional separation of government and technocracy. We review the history of the responses to the pandemic and show how the “tyranny of experts” was severe within the typical technocratic policy response, and attenuated in Sweden's. Thus, the recent pandemic offers empirical evidence and insights regarding the role of Hayekian knowledge problems in engendering a technocratic “tyranny of experts” and how such effects can be structurally mitigated.
... Thus, without a clear response plan, as the crisis emerged, many governments were under pressure to rapidly make sense of incoming information, reach quick decisions, and take decisive action. This pressure may have been amplified by a fear of being blamed for doing "too little" (Bylund and Packard, 2021) and by the intense media focus on the issue. Consequently, initially exaggerated pandemic estimates, case fatality rates, projected rates of community spread, and a focus on only a few dimensions or outcomes at the expense of the larger picture (cf., Ioannidis, 2020;Ioannidis et al., 2020), may have led to some wrong assumptions underlying initial pandemicresponse policies. ...
... A recent review suggests that an explanation for this phenomenon in groups lies in the need to publicly stand by and justify prior decisions, and that this tendency is magnified in diverse groups (Sleesman et al., 2018). For instance, in the context of COVID-19, it seems that early predictions on infection fatality rates (e.g., Ferguson et al., 2020), that are now known to be far too high, have hardly led to an update in policies for most countries (but see Bylund and Packard, 2021 for an account of how Swedish policymakers revised and updated their policies). The actual inferred infection fatality rates seem to be much lower than early estimates, even for countries that had light or no lockdowns Jefferson and Heneghan, 2020;Bylund and Packard, 2021). ...
... For instance, in the context of COVID-19, it seems that early predictions on infection fatality rates (e.g., Ferguson et al., 2020), that are now known to be far too high, have hardly led to an update in policies for most countries (but see Bylund and Packard, 2021 for an account of how Swedish policymakers revised and updated their policies). The actual inferred infection fatality rates seem to be much lower than early estimates, even for countries that had light or no lockdowns Jefferson and Heneghan, 2020;Bylund and Packard, 2021). As a case in point, while the early prediction for California was that at least 1.2 million people over the age of 18 would need a hospital bed, and that 50,000 additional hospital beds were needed, at the height of the infection well under five percent of hospital beds were occupied by COVID-19 patients . ...
The effectiveness of policymakers’ decision-making in times of crisis depends largely on their ability to integrate and make sense of information. The COVID-19 crisis confronts governments with the difficult task of making decisions in the interest of public health and safety. Essentially, policymakers have to react to a threat, of which the extent is unknown, and they are making decisions under time constraints in the midst of immense uncertainty. The stakes are high, the issues involved are complex and require the careful balancing of several interests, including (mental) health, the economy, and human rights. These circumstances render policymakers’ decision-making processes vulnerable to errors and biases in the processing of information, thereby increasing the chances of faulty decision-making processes with poor outcomes. Prior research has identified three main information-processing failures that can distort group decision-making processes and can lead to negative outcomes: (1) failure to search for and share information, (2) failure to elaborate on and analyze information that is not in line with earlier information and (3) failure to revise and update conclusions and policies in the light of new information. To date, it has not yet been explored how errors and biases underlying these information-processing failures impact decision-making processes in times of crisis. In this narrative review, we outline how groupthink, a narrow focus on the problem of containing the virus, and escalation of commitment may pose real risks to decision-making processes in handling the COVID-19 crisis and may result in widespread societal damages. Hence, it is vital that policymakers take steps to maximize the quality of the decision-making process and increase the chances of positive outcomes as the crisis goes forward. We propose group reflexivity—a deliberate process of discussing team goals, processes, or outcomes—as an antidote to these biases and errors in decision-making. Specifically, we recommend several evidence-based reflexivity tools that could easily be implemented to counter these information-processing errors and improve decision-making processes in uncertain times.
... The limitations of Sweden's technocratic response to the pandemic and its gendered consequences can be highlighted in terms of the danger of the "tyranny of experts" and Swedes' perceptions of uncertainty avoidance. Analysts warned against medical and technical solutions that were too slow to offer options based on public good (Baekkeskov et al. 2021;Bennett 2020;Bylund and Packard 2021). According to the 2019 Eurobarometer survey, 2 Swedes value effectiveness and honesty, accountability of elected politicians, the democratic process, and the rule of law. ...
... However, during the second and third waves, as cases and fatalities increased, particularly in nursing homes and marginalized residential neighborhoods, public pressure emerged around systemic shortcomings in elderly care and social services for migrant and refugee families. The pandemic exposed the deficiency of the PHA's "specialized knowledge" and the need for interdisciplinary research to improve care for neglected groups (Baxter et al. 2021;Bylund and Packard 2021). ...
... In terms of governance, voluntary citizen compliance in Sweden is backed by high levels of trust in public authorities and a strong focus upon individual freedom (Josefsson, 2021). The Constitution of Sweden disallows any restrictions on freedom of movement, unless specified by law (Bylund & Packard, 2021). ...
... During 2020, New South Wales was being credited as being the 'gold standard' in pandemic control in Australia, despite imposing relatively light suppression measures (Browne, 2021). The arrival of the delta strain has had a critical impact. ...
Traditional approaches to system management are not suited to highly uncertain conditions. Hard system approaches with a top-down management approach are often used to manage well-defined systems that are not easily able to cope with uncertainty. Soft system approaches of the with bottom-up or participative style may cause a lack of conformance to industry standards. Few studies have investigated these approaches within the context of COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, this paper aims to use the philosophy of Total Systems Intervention to investigate the applicability of an integrated management approach to cope with the uncertainty of COVID-19. Three different countries from Europe, Oceania and Asia are selected as typical case studies to clarify the strengths and weaknesses of differing management approaches. The case studies demonstrate that using an integrated management approach can potentially assist decision-makers to deal with crises and conclusively reveal the superiority of the integrated approach, independent of cultural milieu
... In addition to weighing a broader array of social risks such as employment, mental health, and education (Toshkov et al., 2022), embedded infectious disease authorities are more likely to internalize consensual norms, favoring balanced, middle-of-the-road solutions that avoid coercion. Knowing that trust in national expertise and public compliance with expert recommendations would be high, they are more likely to opt for voluntary guidance than mandatory lockdowns (Bylund & Packard, 2021). As we will argue below, public health agencies formulated action plans based on individual responsibility to combat COVID-19, while government restrictions on mobility, gatherings, and personal hygiene were mild. ...
... It issues guidelines and recommendations on how various actors should behave within its area of expertise. Although the Swedish government has no legal obligation to follow PHA's instructions, it has done so in practice because the wide range of expertise in the PHA, from epidemiologists to economists, reflects a broad array of different considerations (Bylund & Packard, 2021;Pashakhanlou, 2021). According to the Swedish constitution, the government cannot declare a state of emergency to combat a public health crisis because this can only be done in times of war. ...
This paper argues that “following the science” is not always the best strategy. It does so by examining the first phase of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic in three countries: Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden. All three countries possessed highly respected infectious disease agencies with wide stakeholder involvement. Despite this, Danish, Dutch, and Swedish public health agencies underplayed the threat of the COVID‐19 virus, discouraged intrusive mitigation measures, and were slow to admit their mistakes. Countries that trusted their national agencies, specifically the Netherlands and Sweden, witnessed higher mortality. By contrast, the Danish government marginalized its epidemiologists and suppressed the spread of the virus. The paper thus demonstrates the limits of trusting national scientific expertise, even when properly embedded within social networks, during periods of heightened uncertainty. 本文论证认为，“遵循科学”并不总是最好的策略。为此，本文分析了2019冠状病毒病（COVID‐19）大流行在丹麦、荷兰和瑞典这三个国家的第一阶段。这三个国家都拥有备受推崇的传染病机构，并且利益攸关方广泛参与其中。尽管如此，丹麦、荷兰和瑞典的公共卫生机构低估了COVID‐19病毒的威胁，不鼓励采取侵入性缓解措施，并且迟迟不承认自己的错误。荷兰和瑞典信任其国家机构，并且死亡率更高。相比之下，丹麦政府将其流行病学家边缘化并抑制了病毒的传播。因此，本文证明，在不确定性加剧的时期，即使国家科学专业知识被正确地嵌入社会网络，对这种知识加以信任是存在局限性的。 Este artículo argumenta que “seguir la ciencia” no siempre es la mejor estrategia. Lo hace examinando la primera fase de la pandemia de COVID‐19 en tres países: Dinamarca, los Países Bajos y Suecia. Los tres países poseían agencias de enfermedades infecciosas muy respetadas con una amplia participación de las partes interesadas. A pesar de esto, las agencias de salud pública danesas, holandesas y suecas minimizaron la amenaza del virus COVID‐19, desalentaron las medidas de mitigación intrusivas y tardaron en admitir sus errores. Los países que confiaron en sus agencias nacionales, específicamente los Países Bajos y Suecia, fueron testigos de una mayor mortalidad. Por el contrario, el gobierno danés marginó a sus epidemiólogos y suprimió la propagación del virus. El documento demuestra así los límites de confiar en la experiencia científica nacional, incluso cuando está debidamente integrado en las redes sociales, durante períodos de mayor incertidumbre.
... If infectious diseases are complex phenomena, then they may exhibit unpredictable responses to differences in geography, weather, and public policy interventions. Equally, if the cultural-economic systems wherein policy makers and diseases intervene are themselves complex phenomena then differences in economic, cultural, and institutional circumstances may generate considerable unpredictability about the effectiveness of alternative policy regimes (Bylund & Packard, 2021;Coyne et al., 2021). ...
... In this instance, pressure towards convergence on 'lockdowns' was driven partially by bottom-up forces and it may have been the wider institutional separation of the public health bureaucracy in Sweden from the media and political pressure that accounts in part for its relative insulation from such forces. In the latter instance, pluralism was limited from the top down, as officials coordinated on a strategy that rejected lockdowns, as not supported by 'the science'-notwithstanding pressures from some Swedish localities for implementing such measures (Bylund & Packard, 2021). ...
This paper draws on the work of Michel Foucault and Friedrich Hayek to understand threats to personal and enterprise freedom, arising from public health governance. Whereas public choice theory examines the incentives these institutions provide to agents, the analysis here understands those incentives as framed by discursive social constructions that affect the identity, power, and positionality of different actors. It shows how overlapping discourses of scientific rationalism may generate a ‘road to serfdom’ narrowing freedom of action and expression across an expanding terrain. As such, the paper contributes to the growing literature emphasising the importance of narratives, stories and metaphors as shaping political economic action in ways feeding through to outcomes and institutions.
... In other words, even if the value judgments expressed in the function say that individual preferences are to count, these preferences must be those presumed by the observer rather than those revealed in behavior" (Buchanan, 1959, p. 126). The result is that the multiplicity of nuanced and evolving ends that constitute human life are replaced by a single hierarchy of known ends as determined by the analyst, who has narrow expertise and a limited understanding of context-specific conditions (Bylund and Packard, 2021). ...
... Public administration by the state takes place outside of economic calculation (Boettke, 2018, p. 945;Aligica et al., 2019, pp. 1-2;Bylund and Packard, 2021). Government organizations are, by design, not motivated to maximize profit and often do not rely on competitively determined market prices to allocate resources. ...
How can public policy best deal with infectious disease? In answering this question, scholarship on the optimal control of infectious disease adopts the model of a benevolent social planner who maximizes social welfare. This approach, which treats the social health planner as a unitary “public health brain” standing outside of society, removes the policymaking process from economic analysis. This paper opens the black box of the social health planner by extending the tools of economics to the policymaking process itself. We explore the nature of the economic problem facing policymakers and the epistemic constraints they face in trying to solve that problem. Additionally, we analyze the incentives facing policymakers in their efforts to address infectious diseases and consider how they affect the design and implementation of public health policy. Finally, we consider how unanticipated system effects emerge due to interventions in complex systems, and how these effects can undermine well‐intentioned efforts to improve human welfare. We illustrate the various dynamics of the political economy of state responses to infectious disease by drawing on a range of examples from the COVID‐19 pandemic.
... The Swedish approach to managing the pandemic initially received considerable attention [14]. Based on a constitutional separation of government and technocracy, control measures were based on voluntary compliance and citizen responsibility [15]. ...
Background
Addressing the effects of non-compliance with health-related recommendations in pandemics is needed for informed decision-making. This longitudinal study investigated the effects of non-compliance on mental health and academic self-efficacy among university students in Sweden.
Methods
Baseline assessments were conducted in May 2020, with follow-ups after 5 and 10 months. Students ( n = 3123) from 19 universities completed online questionnaires covering compliance, mental health, and academic self-efficacy. Effects of non-compliance were estimated using causal inference and multilevel multinomial regression.
Results
Non-compliant students constituted a minority, but their proportion increased over time. Regarding mental health and academic self-efficacy, few differences were observed between compliant and non-compliant students. When differences were identified, non-compliant students experienced fewer negative effects on mental health and academic self-efficacy than compliant students.
Conclusion
The findings may suggest that non-compliance may have involved a trade-off between increased individual freedom and mitigating negative outcomes. Addressing the research gap on non-compliance effects is crucial for informed decision-making and promoting the common good. This may guide strategies balancing individual autonomy and collective well-being during future pandemics.
Pre-registration
Center for Open Science (OSF), https://accounts.osf.io/login?service=https://osf.io/37dhm/ .
... This conformist behavior prevents social exclusion (Rudert et al., 2023) and provides psychological safety in response to a perceived societal crisis (Wagoner & Pyszczynski, 2024). Individuals may thus easily and unquestioningly adopt the predominant narrative (Roccato et al., 2021), especially when voiced by epistemic authorities such as experts (Bylund & Packard, 2021), to vicariously restore their sense of control (Shepherd et al., 2011). ...
Against the backdrop of the Covid‐19 pandemic, this article undertakes a critical evaluation of a series of
shortcomings of the view of conspiracy theories that is predominant among scholars and the general public.
Reviewing numerous studies on the topic, we critically assess: (a) how justified the claim is that we are in a
conspiracy‐thinking emergency, (b) how the label of conspiracy theorist can be used strategically to
delegitimize heterodox views, and (c) the practical consequences, for academic research and the
well‐functioning of democracies, of unpopular ideas being labeled as conspiratorial. The empirical sources
reviewed here suggest that beliefs in conspiracy theories have not increased over time and are less
consequential than commonly believed, even in times of a global pandemic. Instead, the concept of
conspiracy theory has become more prevalent and its derogatory connotation evokes a stigma that tilts the
playing field against dissenting viewpoints. The stigmatization and political leveraging of this notion, we
argue, lead to biases not only in the public discussion on various sensitive topics but also in the academic
literature on conspiracy theories themselves. We analyze these academic blind spots in light of the
diminishing political diversity in academia and recent perspectives on soft censorship. We propose to
complement the research on conspiracy theorists with an analysis of individuals at the opposite end of the
spectrum, who are inclined to uncritically trust institutional authorities and are prejudiced against heterodox
opinions. Proposed solutions include promoting balanced news coverage, fostering critical thinking through
debates, and piercing information bubbles to provide access to diverse perspectives.
... All this raises the question of what counts as 'scientific', how 'science' is presented to the public, and who are deemed by the public as 'experts' of science. Much has been written about society's collective (over)reliance on expertsor, at least, the people it anointed as 'experts'in responding to the pandemic: how expertise can have its limits in the face of an unprecedented crisis (Lavazza & Farina, 2020;Pietrini et al., 2022), and how a 'tyranny' of expertise has been counterintuitive to the success of pandemic responses (Bylund & Packard, 2021). Our article extends these collective arguments further to show how 'science', 'scientific evidence', and 'expertise' can not only decide pandemic outcomes; they can also be staged to legitimise strategies that inevitably affect those outcomes. ...
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, public officials in the United States – from the President to governors, mayors, lawmakers, and even school district commissioners – touted unproven treatments for COVID-19 alongside, and sometimes as opposed to, mask and vaccine mandates. Utilising the framework of ‘pharmaceutical messianism’, our article focuses on three such cures – hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and monoclonal antibodies – to explore how pharmaceuticals were mobilised within politicised pandemic discourses. Using the states of Utah, Texas, and Florida as illustrative examples, we make the case for paying attention to pharmaceutical messianism at the subnational and local levels, which can very well determine pandemic responses and outcomes in contexts such as the US where subnational governments have wide autonomy. Moreover, we argue that aside from the affordability of the treatments being studied and the heterodox knowledge claiming their efficacy, the widespread uptake of these cures was also informed by popular medical (including immunological) knowledge, pre-existing attitudes toward ‘orthodox’ measures like vaccines and masks, and mistrust toward authorities and institutions identified with the ‘medical establishment’. Taken together, our case studies affirm the recurrent nature of pharmaceutical messianism in times of health crises – while also refining the concept and exposing its limitations.
... In contrast to a lock-down approach, this made it possible to maintain important social relationships and contacts if this was considered necessary. 19 The Swedish Government has reported that the overall socioeconomic effects of the pandemic were less prominent in Sweden as compared with many other European countries. 20 Considering the significance of social relationships in conjunction with the large proportion of individuals affected by COVID-19, there is a scarcity of studies, particularly longitudinal, about whether contagion via social relationships affected students' mental health and academic self-efficacy. ...
Objective
This study used causal inference to estimate the longitudinal effects of contagion in cohabitants and family members on university students’ mental health and academic self-efficacy during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Design
A prospective longitudinal study including a baseline online measurement in May 2020, and online follow-ups after 5 months and 10 months. Participants were recruited through open-access online advertising.
Setting
Public universities and university colleges in Sweden.
Participants
The analytical sample included 2796 students.
Outcome measures
Contagion in cohabitants and in family members was assessed at baseline and at the 5-month follow-up. Mental health and academic self-efficacy were assessed at the 5-month and 10-month follow-ups.
Results
Mild symptoms reported in cohabitants at baseline resulted in negative mental health effects at follow-up 5 months later, and mild baseline symptoms in family members resulted in negative effects on academic self-efficacy at follow-ups both 5 and 10 months later.
Conclusions
Notwithstanding the lack of precision in estimated effects, the findings emphasise the importance of social relationships and the challenges of providing students with sufficient support in times of crisis.
... Indeed, there are different adjectives used for the term, such as 'total' , 'full' , 'hard' , 'partial' , and/or 'soft' lockdown suggesting also different degrees of restrictions". Some comparative studies (Boretti 2020; Meunier 2020; Bendavid et al. 2021; Fuss et al. 2021) have shown that the particularly severe restrictions adopted in Italy, and in other countries that enacted similar policies, did not have effects markedly different from those of the less severe ones adopted in others, both in Europe (e.g. in Sweden, on which see: Yan et al. 2020;Bylund and Packard 2021;Kuhlmann et al. 2021) and in other continents (e.g. in South Korea: Jeong et al. 2020; You 2020). 11 As Bendavid et al. (2021, p. 4) note, after comparing eight countries that implemented more restrictive policies (i.e. ...
The Covid-19 pandemic has been analysed and discussed from many disciplinary perspectives. An aspect that still needs critical exploration is the role-that is, the modes and forms-of regulatory interventions during the pandemic. It is interesting to note in this regard that, in many studies, regulatory measures are labelled "non-pharmaceutical interventions", as if they do not have any specificity on their own and only represent a theoretically residual category. The main aim of this article is instead to focus on the distinctive features of normative measures as such. As regards the article's focus, it centres on the normative interventions in the first period of the pandemic-that is, 2020-with particular reference to Italy. We have chosen to focus on this period because the most extensive and severe restrictions introduced to combat Covid-19 were established at that time. And we have chosen to consider Italy because it was the first country, after China, to be hard hit by the virus and to react in a draconian manner. As regards the methodology, the article is based, in general and primarily, on an extensive interdisciplinary literature review. With reference to the Italian case, the study is additionally based on: first-hand data collection and analysis (especially concerning Italian normative measures mainly issued at the national level: their type, frequency, target, hierarchical relationships); secondhand data and analysis (for instance as regards the effectiveness of Italy's and other countries' regulatory measures). In discussing the Italian response to the Covid-19 pandemic, certain weaknesses have been identified; and possible lessons have been highlighted, in terms of both "planning" (i.e. the necessity to better pre-define concrete and circumscribed sets of actions) and of "meta-planning" (i.e. the necessity of better planning the way in which public authorities could and should plan and act). Although this article is mainly based on the Italian situation, what we can learn from this case is largely generalizable.
... However, in extreme cases, this expert-based approach can lead to the 'tyranny of experts'. 18 This tendency of political decision-makers to rely on experts rather than on EbM in fast-changing situations is unsatisfactory, even risky. Therefore, we believe science must deliver evidence-based recommendations with low uncertainty for health policy decisionmaking that apply to two critically important decisions and procedures: ...
Background:
To reduce their decisional uncertainty, health policy decision-makers rely more often on experts or their intuition than on evidence-based knowledge, especially in times of urgency. However, this practice is unacceptable from an evidence-based medicine (EbM) perspective. Therefore, in fast-changing and complex situations, we need an approach that delivers recommendations that serve decision-makers' needs for urgent, sound and uncertainty-reducing decisions based on the principles of EbM.
Aims:
The aim of this paper is to propose an approach that serves this need by enriching EbM with theory.
Materials and methods:
We call this the EbM+theory approach, which integrates empirical and theoretical evidence in a context-sensitive way to reduce intervention and implementation uncertainty.
Results:
Within this framework, we propose two distinct roadmaps to decrease intervention and implementation uncertainty: one for simple and the other for complex interventions. As part of the roadmap, we present a three-step approach: applying theory (step 1), conducting mechanistic studies (EbM+; step 2) and conducting experiments (EbM; step 3).
Discussion:
This paper is a plea for integrating empirical and theoretical knowledge by combining EbM, EbM+ and theoretical knowledge in a common procedural framework that allows flexibility even in dynamic times. A further aim is to stimulate a discussion on using theories in health sciences, health policy, and implementation.
Conclusion:
The main implications are that scientists and health politicians - the two main target groups of this paper-should receive more training in theoretical thinking; moreover, regulatory agencies like NICE may think about the usefulness of integrating elements of the EbM+theory approach into their considerations.
... Overall, democratic regimes under socialist ideology seem to lack additional political instruments to rein in large welfare bureaucracies and take bold, decisive action in crisis situations. Coalitional governments in multi-party parliamentary democracies, in particular, are vulnerable to a confidence vote from even a minor defection and may hand over policymaking authority to bureaucratic agencies and select scientific groups, i.e., the so-called "tyranny of experts" problem (Bylund and Packard, 2021). ...
Why are some governments more active in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic than others? Based on ample literature on the political determinants of pandemic responses, this paper seeks to understand the question with an interactive framework of ideology strategies and their political conditions. Resorting to a dataset of 155 countries and their COVID responses in the year of 2020 (before the world enters into the vaccination phase in 2021), we find that government COVID responsiveness is associated with the interactions between the specific character of ideological legitimation strategy (socialist or conservative) invoked by the government and the political system (democratic or decentralized) where it operates. Overall, this research contributes to a multifactor understanding of the political explanations for government responses to crises. It also provides insight for policy choices and designs that are more suitable for the leadership and political contexts.
... We demonstrated how arguments were posed to justify major choices and call on others to align with them. In doing so, we also showed that differences in the management of Covid-19 are not solely explained by political-administrative attributes (Bylund & Packard, 2021), but also by trade-offs made and positions taken by governments and authorities that surface in their communication efforts (however, for a discussion of how the different administrative traditions and models of governance did influence the different pandiemic responses in the Nordics, see Sandberg, Chapter 2). ...
This chapter examines how leading politicians and representatives of the public health authorities in Scandinavia attempted to create consent for their strategic choices to adopt or refrain from collective prevention measures, such as border and school closures, when such measures became relevant in the region in March 2020. It thus also concerns the broader strategic choices of the administrations in their attempts to curb or stop Covid-19. Based on a strategy-as-practice perspective, the chapter assumes that strategies are not artefacts that organisations only possess, but they are shaped, consolidated, and made public communicatively. The analysis of statements from press conferences shows how strategies are shaped communicatively through claims regarding a number of themes: economic consequences; the validity of epidemiological measures; secondary public health effects; the issue of risk severity (and in the Swedish case, natural immunity); and risk management history. The chapter also highlights the pragmatic arguments used and the dialogicality involved when a particular strategic choice is made viable through the presentation of alternatives. The chapter thus helps to bridge a gap between major response choices facing national and agency leaders on the one hand, and on the other, numerous micro-level communication efforts facilitated in part through press conferences.
... We demonstrated how arguments were posed to justify major choices and call on others to align with them. In doing so, we also showed that differences in the management of Covid-19 are not solely explained by political-administrative attributes (Bylund & Packard, 2021), but also by trade-offs made and positions taken by governments and authorities that surface in their communication efforts (however, for a discussion of how the different administrative traditions and models of governance did influence the different pandiemic responses in the Nordics, see Sandberg, Chapter 2). ...
This edited volume compares experiences of how the Covid-19 pandemic was communicated in the Nordic countries – Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. The Nordic countries are often discussed in terms of similarities concerning an extensive welfare system, economic policies, media systems, and high levels of trust in societal actors. However, in the wake of a global pandemic, the countries’ coping strategies varied, creating certain question marks on the existence of a “Nordic model”.
The chapters give a broad overview of crisis communication in the Nordic countries during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic by combining organisational and societal theoretical perspectives and encompassing crisis response from governments, public health authorities, lobbyists, corporations, news media, and citizens. The results show several similarities, such as political and governmental responses highlighting solidarity and the need for exceptional measures, as expressed in press conferences, social media posts, information campaigns, and speeches. The media coverage relied on experts and was mainly informative, with few critical investigations during the initial phases. Moreover, surveys and interviews show the importance of news media for citizens’ coping strategies, but also that citizens mostly trusted both politicians and health authorities during the crisis.
This book is of interest to all who are looking to understand societal crisis management on a comprehensive level. The volume contains chapters from leading experts from all the Nordic countries and is edited by a team with complementary expertise on crisis communication, political communication, and journalism, consisting of Bengt Johansson, Øyvind Ihlen, Jenny Lindholm, and Mark Blach-Ørsten.
... While the responses of the UK and Swedish governments to the COVID-19 pandemic differed over time, these countries have reportedly had among the worst per-capita COVID-19 mortality rates in Europe (Mishra et al., 2021). Where the UK government first imposed a national lockdown with mandatory measures in March 2020, that placed stringent restrictions on its citizens 2 , Sweden's early policies represented a more laissez-faire approach, relying predominantly on individual responsibility, voluntary compliance with government rules, information sharing and an expectation of trust in authorities (Bylund and Packard, 2021;Wissö and Bäck-Wiklund, 2021). This placed it 'on the periphery of the global spotlight' (Lindelle, 2021: 75). ...
This article explores the impacts of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown policies on young fathers and their families. We present analyses from a larger programme of qualitative longitudinal research examining young fatherhood in the UK and Sweden to develop a unique international comparative and empirical contribution. The views and experiences of young fathers are examined in the context of two ostensibly different policy approaches during the pandemic. Organised thematically to enable comparison, our findings demonstrate myriad impacts, illustrating heightened precarity in young fathers’ transitions into and through fatherhood linked to restrictions on their engagement and changes to their education and employment trajectories and relational contexts, especially in the UK. We observe how differences in policy approaches before and during the first wave of the pandemic shaped the experiences of young fathers in the respective countries.
... While inherited bureaucratic power obstructed effective policy, it also expedited ineffective policy and heightened our exposure to "expert failure" (Koppl, 2021). Privileged and exclusive powers granted to political authorities in the past reduced their exposure to competitive forces (Bylund & Packard, 2021). Arguably, this created an environment devoid of error discovery and lacking in the kind of epistemic feedback afforded by more competitive systems (Storr et al., 2021). ...
In The Pox of Liberty, Werner Troesken details the tradeoff between liberal institutions and communicable disease. According to Troesken, individual freedom presents a danger to the public health in the face of infectious disease, while constitutional constraints restrict the government’s ability to implement effective policy. Contra Troesken, I argue that decision-makers, amidst a crisis of contagion, neglect intertemporal tradeoffs, thereby discounting long run costs while favoring short run policies. These policies, once implemented, are difficult to reverse due to the path dependent nature of political institutions. Irreversible and self-reinforcing growth in political institutions established to enhance health can have an unintended negative impact on health during future crises, where political agents must operate in a more cumbersome and error-prone institutional environment. Using events from the history of public health in the U.S. as support for my theory, I conclude that Troesken’s alleged tradeoff ought to be met with greater skepticism.
... Members of such groups often develop a high degree of emotional like-mindedness, and conventional inhibitions in such groups often decrease (60). In light of the crisis, experts were asked to advise governments, and these used behavioral interventions to steer public behavior in the desired direction and, simultaneously, the debate became highly polarized and politicized (61,62). Indeed, the behavior of people changed quite radically in the early days of the crisis (63,64), as psychologists advised governments on how to use psychological tactics to affect behavior change [e.g., (65,66)]. ...
A series of aggressive restrictive measures were adopted around the world in 2020–2022 to attempt to prevent SARS-CoV-2 from spreading. However, it has become increasingly clear the most aggressive (lockdown) response strategies may involve negative side-effects such as a steep increase in poverty, hunger, and inequalities. Several economic, educational, and health repercussions have fallen disproportionately on children, students, young workers, and especially on groups with pre-existing inequalities such as low-income families, ethnic minorities, and women. This has led to a vicious cycle of rising inequalities and health issues. For example, educational and financial security decreased along with rising unemployment and loss of life purpose. Domestic violence surged due to dysfunctional families being forced to spend more time with each other. In the current narrative and scoping review, we describe macro-dynamics that are taking place because of aggressive public health policies and psychological tactics to influence public behavior, such as mass formation and crowd behavior. Coupled with the effect of inequalities, we describe how these factors can interact toward aggravating ripple effects. In light of evidence regarding the health, economic and social costs, that likely far outweigh potential benefits, the authors suggest that, first, where applicable, aggressive lockdown policies should be reversed and their re-adoption in the future should be avoided. If measures are needed, these should be non-disruptive. Second, it is important to assess dispassionately the damage done by aggressive measures and offer ways to alleviate the burden and long-term effects. Third, the structures in place that have led to counterproductive policies should be assessed and ways should be sought to optimize decision-making, such as counteracting groupthink and increasing the level of reflexivity. Finally, a package of scalable positive psychology interventions is suggested to counteract the damage done and improve humanity's prospects.
... In Denmark, experts aligned to the view of elected leaders who pursued a hard lockdown. Instead, in Sweden, health scientists played a leading role in persuading policymakers to engage in a soft policy response based on voluntary compliance with precautionary measures (Baekkeskov et al., 2021;Bylund and Packard, 2021). ...
We build an evolutionary game-theoretic model of the interaction between policymakers and experts in shaping the policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Players’ decisions concern two alternative strategies of pandemic management: a “hard” approach, enforcing potentially unpopular measures such as strict confinement orders, and a “soft” approach, based upon voluntary and short-lived social distancing. Policymakers’ decisions may also rely upon expert advice. Unlike experts, policymakers are sensitive to a public consensus incentive that makes lifting restrictions as soon as possible especially desirable. This incentive may conflict with the overall goal of mitigating the effects of the pandemic, leading to a typical policy dilemma. We show that the selection of strategies may be path-dependent, as their initial distribution is a crucial driver of players’ choices. Contingent on cultural factors and the epidemiological conditions, steady states in which both types of players unanimously endorse the strict strategy can coexist with others where experts and policymakers agree on the soft strategy, depending on the initial conditions. The model can also lead to attractive asymmetric equilibria where experts and policymakers endorse different strategies, or to cyclical dynamics where the shares of adoption of strategies oscillate indefinitely around a mixed strategy equilibrium. This multiplicity of equilibria can explain the coexistence of contrasting pandemic countermeasures observed across countries in the first wave of the outbreak. Our results suggest that cross-country differences in the COVID-19 policy response need not be the effect of poor decision making. Instead, they can endogenously result from the interplay between policymakers and experts incentives under the local social, cultural and epidemiological conditions.
... In response to the first wave of the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, most political organizations around the world adopted a strong policy to implement rules and regulations, including closing unnecessary businesses and imposing curfews [5]. As far as China is concerned, all provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions, including Hubei, launched a first-class response to a major public health emergency involving almost the whole country's population. ...
The popularization of education on the administrative compulsion law in response to major epidemic situations in China refers to the educational activities carried out by an educational subject aimed at an educational object promoting understanding and mastery of knowledge of administrative compulsion. The goal is to improve the government’s legal ability to prevent and control behavior, enhance people’s awareness of the rule of law, and provide a strong legal basis for the rule of law in the context of major epidemics. Other aims are to cultivate citizens’ legal beliefs, restrain citizens’ conduct, and maintain a stable social order. However, problems arise in the subject, content, and mode of the educational activities. Therefore, we need to discuss compulsory education in the context of major epidemic situations, including the need for a favorable educational environment, the strengthening of information distribution, and the guidance of public opinion on administrative enforcement. We should also improve education subjects to enhance the legal quality of administrative organs, perfect the education content, encourage people to support administrative compulsion in epidemic situations, and deliver education in campus online classes.
... In the social sciences, work has in part focused on explaining the origins of different national strategies for managing the pandemic; and this work has produced two prevalent explanations for how national strategies come to be. According to these accounts, strategies (and their outcomes) can be explained either by reference to the individual actors involved, that is, to politicians and the expert groups advising them (Bylund and Packard, 2021, see also Baekkeskov, 2016 for a similar argument regarding the 2009 H1N1 pandemic) or by looking to comparative differences in the national legal frameworks and politico-legal traditions (Hirschfeldt & Petersson, 2020;Jonung, 2020;Kuhlmann et al., 2021;Petridou, 2020;Wenander, 2021;Yan et al., 2020). ...
Several suggestions have been made as to why Sweden's approach to managing the COVID-19 pandemic came to rely on a strategy based on voluntary measures. Two of the most prominent explanations for why the country chose a different strategy than many other countries have focused on micro- and macro-level factors, explaining the strategy either in terms of the psychologies of prominent actors or by pointing to particularities in Swedish constitutional law. Supported by a qualitative analysis using interviews and text analysis, we argue that the Swedish strategy cannot be understood without paying attention to the meso-level and the organizations that produced the strategy. Moreover, we argue that to understand why one of the central organizations in Swedish pandemic management, the Public Health Agency, came to favor certain interventions, one must investigate the culture of production inside the organization and how it created precedents that led the Agency to approach pandemic management with a focus on balancing current and future health risks.
... This analysis indicated that political decisionmakers had to make decisions without relying on evidence-based knowledge specific to COVID-19. In the beginning, politicians predominantly relied on scientific experts, particularly virologists, epidemiologists, and mathematical modeling experts (7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12). After having been called upon for help by politicians, the scientific community developed new, agile ways of assembling knowledge quickly (13-16). ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has posed an extraordinary challenge for public health and health policy. Questions have arisen concerning the main strategies to cope with this situation and the lessons to be learned from the pandemic. This conceptual paper aims to clarify these questions via sociological concepts. Regarding coping strategies used during the pandemic, there is a strong tendency for health policymakers to rely on expert knowledge rather than on evidence-based knowledge. This has caused the evidence-based healthcare community to respond to urgent demands for advice by rapidly processing new knowledge. Nonetheless, health policymakers still mainly rely on experts in making policy decisions. Our sociological analysis of this situation identified three lessons for coping with pandemic and non-pandemic health challenges: (1) the phenomenon of accelerating knowledge processing could be interpreted from the organizational innovation perspective as a shift from traditional mechanistic knowledge processing to more organic forms of knowledge processing. This can be described as an “organic turn.” (2) The return of experts is part of this organic turn and shows that experts provide both evidence-based knowledge as well as theoretical, experiential, and contextual knowledge. (3) Experts can use theory to expeditiously provide advice at times when there is limited evidence available and to provide complexity-reducing orientation for decisionmakers at times where knowledge production leads to an overload of knowledge; thus, evidence-based knowledge should be complemented by theory-based knowledge in a structured two-way interaction to obtain the most comprehensive and valid recommendations for health policy.
... The pandemic has thereby accentuated tensions in the role of experts and expertise in democracies, an ongoing debate since Plato's time. On one hand, some warn that the pandemic has catalyzed the evolution of democracies into technocracies [44], whereas others suggest that the pandemic instead sheds light on the existing role of experts and expertise in present-day democracies [45], a role argued to have become increasingly significant over the past 50 years [46]. One scholarly concern about this 'expertization' is that the shift of policy decisions to the realm of science instead of being subject to political debate diminishes space for non-expert disagreement. ...
Background
The Covid-19 pandemic has had unprecedented effects on individual lives and livelihoods as well as on social, health, economic and political systems and structures across the world. This article derives from a unique collaboration between researchers and museums using rapid response crowdsourcing to document contemporary life among the general public during the pandemic crisis in Sweden.
Methods and findings
We use qualitative analysis to explore the narrative crowdsourced submissions of the same 88 individuals at two timepoints, during the 1st and 2nd pandemic waves, about what they most fear in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic, and how their descriptions changed over time. In this self-selected group, we found that aspects they most feared generally concerned responses to the pandemic on a societal level, rather than to the Covid-19 disease itself or other health-related issues. The most salient fears included a broad array of societal issues, including general societal collapse and fears about effects on social and political interactions among people with resulting impact on political order. Notably strong support for the Swedish pandemic response was expressed, despite both national and international criticism.
Conclusions
This analysis fills a notable gap in research literature that lacks subjective and detailed investigation of experiences of the general public, despite recognition of the widespread effects of Covid-19 and its’ management strategies. Findings address controversy about the role of experts in formulating and communicating strategy, as well as implications of human responses to existential threats. Based on this analysis, we call for broader focus on societal issues related to this existential threat and the responses to it.
... Our paper contributes to three important literatures. First, it contributes to the new but growing literature on the policy approaches to the COVID-19 pandemic in federal systems (Boettke & Powell, 2021;Coyne et al., 2021); the effectiveness of India's countrywide lockdown in containing the pandemic (Beyer et al., 2020;Goswami et al., 2021); and the literature on lockdown measures in other countries (Bylund & Packard, 2021;Hall & McCannon, 2021;and Storr et al., 2021). Second, it adds to the literature on Indian federalism, in particular the literature that focuses on the centripetal and dysfunctional policies that are imposed on the states by the central government (Parikh & Weingast, 1997;Rajagopalan, 2017;Tripathi, 1974). ...
The Indian federation is highly centripetal, and historically, this has left states without the requisite legislative and fiscal authority to take independent action and initiate policies of significance. Consequently, India's response to the global COVID‐19 pandemic was to impose a very severe countrywide lockdown using the mandate of the Union (federal) government. This centralized one‐size‐fits‐all diktat was imposed despite high variations across states in resources, healthcare capacity, and incidence of COVID‐19 cases. We argue that India's dysfunctional federalism is the reason for the centralized lockdown, preventing state and local governments from tailoring a policy response to suit local needs. Using mobility data, we demonstrate the high variation in curtailing mobility in different states through the centralized lockdown. We find that India's centralized lockdown was at best a partial success in a handful of states, while imposing enormous economic costs even in areas where few were affected by the pandemic.
... 4 Oklahoma also reopened on April 24 but, as noted above, its safer-at-home order was more limited than orders imposed in other states. 5 On political economy issues related to COVID-19, see Boettke and Powell (2021); Bylund and Packard (2021); Choutagunta et al. (2021); Coyne et al. (2021); March (2021); Storr et al. (2021); Redford and Dills (2021). 6 For example, see chapter 32 of Cowen and Tabarrok (2021). ...
We provide an initial assessment of the Federal Reserve's policy response to the COVID‐19 contraction. We briefly review the historical episode and consider the standard textbook treatment of a pandemic on the macroeconomy. We summarize and then evaluate the Fed's monetary and emergency lending policies through the end of 2020. We credit the Fed with promoting monetary stability while maintaining that it could have done more. We argue that the Fed could have achieved stability without employing its emergency lending facilities. Although some facilities likely helped to promote general liquidity, others were primarily intended to allocate credit, which blurs the line between monetary and fiscal policy. These credit allocation facilities were unwarranted and unwise.
... 3 The purpose of these orders was to limit the spread of the 3 While our analysis focuses on the United States, other countries have also initiated various policies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. For a discussion on the severe lockdowns imposed in India, see Choutagunta et al. (2021), and for the more decentralized and voluntary approach taken by Sweden, see Bylund and Packard (2021). . Under these orders, each jurisdiction designated certain businesses or organizations as essential, allowing them to continue operating. ...
In response to the COVID‐19 pandemic, governments around the world issued stay‐at‐home orders, which required that individuals stay at home unless they were engaging in certain activities. Often these orders would designate certain goods and services as “essential” and would permit individuals engaged in the production, delivery, and purchase of those goods and services to leave their homes to do so. Implicit in these policies, of course, is the assumption that policymakers can know ex ante which goods and services are essential. As proved true while these stay‐at‐home orders were in effect, essentialness is necessarily subjective and depends on knowledge that is often dispersed, inarticulate, and changes over time. Policymakers, however, do not and often cannot have access to the local knowledge needed to determine ex ante which goods and services are essential, and they lack the feedback mechanisms they would need to adroitly adapt when circumstances change. This paper examines these knowledge problems associated with designating certain goods and services as “essential” when crafting and implementing stay‐at‐home orders.
Using a securitization lens, this article explores the climate adaptation discourse and its impact on the making and implementation of adaptation strategies in Sweden. The main goal is to discern whether climate change is understood and addressed as a security issue within Swedish climate adaptation policy, examining its practical implications from national to local levels. We scrutinize the discourses employed to frame climate adaptation and assess whether these align with threatification, riskification, or normal politics. We explore the actors and tools involved in creating this framing. Our findings reveal examples of threat‐ and risk‐oriented securitizations of climate adaptation strategy; however, most evidence highlights discourses and practices associated with normal politics across governance levels. Nationally, climate adaptation is managed akin to any other policy domain. Prioritization of adaptation goals takes place through centralized decision‐making, then monitored through accountability mechanisms spanning national, subregional, and local levels. The national government maintains financial and monitoring control throughout this chain. Municipalities possess significant autonomy in determining the means and methods to achieve adaptation objectives. This indicates that some securitization, but mainly normal policymaking, describes climate change adaption in Sweden ‐ an outcome strongly influenced by organizational fragmentation, scarce resources, and a pronounced role for experts.
The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted global public health systems and economic frameworks. Many researchers have delved into these effects and widely discussed the ramifications. Building upon existing literature, this paper comparatively analyses the strategies adopted by France and Sweden in responding to the COVID-19 outbreak, emphasising the effectiveness and implications of the approaches undertaken by countries with centralised versus decentralised political systems to overcome COVID-19. Through comprehensive review of literature, news reports, and other sources, this study reveals psychological resistance and disdain towards COVID-19 vaccination among the populace under France’s centralised government system, alongside significant issues of “Tyranny of Experts” within Sweden’s decentralised governance framework.
Biomedical science suffered a loss of trust during the Covid‐19 pandemic. Why? One reason is a crisis fueled by confusion over the epistemology of science. Attacks on biomedical expertise rest on a mistaken view of what the justification is for crediting scientific information. The ideas that science is characterized by universal agreement and that any evolution or change of beliefs about facts and theories undermines trustworthiness in science are simply false. Biomedical science is trustworthy precisely because it is fallible, admits error, adjusts to new information, and, most importantly, is practical. Successful diagnosis and cure demarcate the boundaries of warranted knowledge. The other reason is sociological. As the pandemic made all too clear, the loss of faith in scientific experts was due to the failure of most of them to engage in regular public dialogue, reflecting a failure to recognize the obligation that science has to bolster trust in its work and findings by concerted public engagement .
Novel externalities are social activities for which the emerging cost (or benefit) of the spillover is unknown and must be discovered. Negative novel externalities have regained international salience following the COVID-19 pandemic. Such cases frequently are invoked as evidence of the limits of liberal political economy for dealing with public emergencies. Through a re-reading of classical political economy with the modern state’s confrontation with infectious disease in mind, we defend the comparative efficacy of liberal democracy against authoritarian alternatives for coping with these social problems. Effective responses to novel externalities require producing and updating trustworthy public information and an independent scientific community to validate and interpret it. Those epistemic capacities are prevalent in liberal democratic regimes with multiple sources of political power, an independent civil society, and practices of academic freedom. Our analysis highlights the theoretical value of polycentrism and self-governance beyond their more familiar role, of increasing accountability and competition in the provision of local public goods, towards facilitating effective national policy.
Public choice theory suggests that the pandemic policy responses were in fact the result of politicians’ and bureaucrats’ ambition to pursue their own interest. The main target of politicians during the Covid-19 pandemic was the one that politicians typically aim at, i.e., to maximize votes. Lockdowns, mass vaccination, and vaccine passports are largely explained by the vote maximizing premise. Bureaucrats such as scientists who work for the government but who do not appear as candidates in the elections also engaged in utility maximizing during the Covid-19 pandemic by pursuing their own goals which include, among others, increased popularity and willingness to establish their reputation. A budget maximizing analysis is used to illustrate how an ever-increasing budget satisfies nearly all groups involved in the pandemic, i.e., politicians, bureaucrats, and voters. Findings from polls and election results verify the public choice analysis.
The roaring (20‐) 20s are a decade of anniversaries and milestones. 2020 was the 100th anniversary of Ludwig von Mises's seminal article “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” and the 75th anniversary of F.A. Hayek's seminal article “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” 2022 brought a series of significant anniversaries: the 100th anniversary of Mises's Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis as well as the 60th anniversary of James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock's The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, and Murray Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State. It was also the 20th anniversary of Vernon Smith's Nobel Prize. The works and milestones celebrating anniversaries in 2022 owe much to Mises's and Hayek's pathbreaking contributions. This paper summarizes and contextualizes Mises's and Hayek's arguments about socialism and knowledge and introduces a Southern Economic Journal symposium on the anniversaries of “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” and “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”
The notion of separation of power is a crucial prerequisite for both consolidated and emerging constitutional democracies. The functional and structural divisions between the three branches of government in every democratic state are embedded in the concept of separation of powers. South Africa having negotiated a new constitution that gave birth to a constitutional democracy in postapartheid, the idea of separation and balancing of power was ingrained into the laws enacted by the state. Despite the misgivings surrounding the practical application of the concept, the country has made some strides in defending the letter and spirit of the 1996 Constitution by upholding the doctrine of separation of power and rule of law through a functioning government, independent judiciary, and effective parliament. Thus, this chapter unpacked the commitment of South Africa toward the tenets of separation of power. The study highlighted that the institutional and procedural structures have inspired cooperative government and checks and balances among the branches of government. Moreover, the structural and procedural partitions of public powers coupled with oversight responsibilities and veto powers have increased the assurance of the public in the three branches of government. The study emphasized that the emerging democracy in South Africa could be further consolidated if the branches of government remain committed to the tenets of separation of power.
The Swedish approach to managing the 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic has received significant attention in international scholarly work and press. For this dataset, we have reviewed governmental and media archives to build a detailed timeline that chronicles significant policies, interventions, and events in the Swedish management of COVID-19. The dataset contains summary descriptions of what took place, when it happened, and who the principal actors involved were. Links to primary sources are provided for each entry. Because of the level of detail and saturation, the dataset offers a detailed account of Swedish pandemic governance and will benefit anyone working on Swedish pandemic management or doing comparative work between Sweden and other jurisdictions.
The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented global crisis in which governments had to act in a situation of rapid change and substantial uncertainty. The governments of Germany, Sweden and the UK have taken different paths allowing learning for future pandemic preparedness. To help inform discussions on preparedness, inspired by resilience frameworks, this paper reviews governance structures, and the role of science and the media in the COVID-19 response of Germany, Sweden and the UK in 2020. We mapped legitimacy, interdependence, knowledge generation and the capacity to deal with uncertainty.
Our analysis revealed stark differences which were linked to pre-existing governing structures, the traditional role of academia, experience of crisis management and the communication of uncertainty—all of which impacted on how much people trusted their government. Germany leveraged diversity and inclusiveness, a ‘patchwork quilt’, for which it was heavily criticised during the second wave. The Swedish approach avoided plurality and largely excluded academia, while in the UK’s academia played an important role in knowledge generation and in forcing the government to review its strategies. However, the vivant debate left the public with confusing and rapidly changing public health messages. Uncertainty and the lack of evidence on how best to manage the COVID-19 pandemic—the main feature during the first wave—was only communicated explicitly in Germany. All country governments lost trust of their populations during the epidemic due to a mix of communication and transparency failures, and increased questioning of government legitimacy and technical capacity by the public.
We argue that the policy response to the COVID‐19 pandemic by all levels of government around the world is not consistent with recommendations from standard welfare economics. Thus, it is important to ask why such policies have been adopted. That opens the door to examining the political economy of the COVID‐19 pandemic. This requires examining the incentives and information that confront policymakers and voters and the institutional environments that shape their incentives and information. This lead article frames questions addressed in the remainder of the symposium.
In the response to COVID-19, countries have implemented response strategies along a continuum of population- and venue-level specificity ranging from suppression to mitigation strategies. Suppression strategies generally include population-wide shelter-in-place mandates or lockdowns, closure of nonessential physical venues, travel bans, testing and contact tracing, and quarantines. Sweden followed a mitigation strategy focused on risk-tailored approaches to mitigate specific acquisition risks among the elderly, minimizing the disruption to education and the delivery of other health care services, and recommendations for social distancing to minimize the disease burden. To date, Sweden has reported higher case counts and attributable mortality than other Scandinavian countries and lower than other Northern European countries. However, there are several limitations with comparison given heterogeneity in testing strategies, suspected and confirmed case definitions, and assessment of attributable mortality. The decisions in Sweden also reflect social priorities such as equity being a foundational principle of Swedish social systems. Consistently, in-person education for those aged less than 16 years continued throughout. Notably, the mitigation strategy did not eliminate the inequitable impacts of COVID-19 cases and mortality in Sweden with higher-exposure and generally lower-income occupations being associated with higher risks intersecting with these communities often residing in more dense multigenerational households. From January 1 to November 15, there has been a 1.8% increase in all-cause mortality in 2020 compared with the average of 2015-2019, representing an excess of 14.3 deaths per 100,000 population. However, the final assessment of excess deaths in Sweden in 2020 including stratification by age and integration of secular trends can only be calculated in the coming years. In response to increasing cases in the fall of 2020, Sweden has continued to leverage business-oriented regulations and public-oriented guidelines for social distancing rather than police-enforced mandates. Ultimately, pandemics present no winners. Countries have implemented a range of different COVID-19 prevention and mitigation strategies responsive to their own priorities and legal systems including equity and the balancing of competing health priorities. Given these varied approaches, countries that pursued elimination, suppression, or mitigation strategies can collaboratively learn from both successes and challenges of the different strategies to inform COVID-19 and future pandemic responses.
As global deaths from COVID-19 continue to rise, the world’s governments, institutions, and agencies are still working toward an understanding of who is most at risk of death. In this study, data on all recorded COVID-19 deaths in Sweden up to May 7, 2020 are linked to high-quality and accurate individual-level background data from administrative registers of the total population. By means of individual-level survival analysis we demonstrate that being male, having less individual income, lower education, not being married all independently predict a higher risk of death from COVID-19 and from all other causes of death. Being an immigrant from a low- or middle-income country predicts higher risk of death from COVID-19 but not for all other causes of death. The main message of this work is that the interaction of the virus causing COVID-19 and its social environment exerts an unequal burden on the most disadvantaged members of society.
Significance
We investigate what drives OECD countries to adopt COVID-19 restrictive policies such as lockdowns and school closures, and find that government policies are strongly driven by the policies initiated in other countries. The level of democracy also matters: While strong democracies are slower to initiate restrictive policies, they are more likely to follow the policies of nearby countries. Following the lead of others rather than making decisions based on the specific situation of the country may have led to countries locking down either too early or too late. Conversely, if countries follow each other when easing restrictive policies or reinitiate such policies, there may be a situation where countries adopt epidemiologically suboptimal policies.
Upwards of 70% of the Covid19 death toll in Sweden has been people in elderly care services (as of mid-May 2020). We summarize the Covid19 tragedy in elderly care in Sweden, particularly in the City of Stockholm. We explain the institutional structure of elderly care administration and service provision. Those who died of Covid19 in Stockholm’s nursing homes had a life-remaining median somewhere in the range of 5 to 9 months. Having contextualized the Covid19 problem in City of Stockholm, we present an interview of Barbro Karlsson, who works at the administrative heart of the Stockholm elderly care system. Her institutional knowledge and sentiment offer great insight into the concrete problems and challenges. There are really two sides to the elderly care Covid19 challenge: The vulnerability and frailty of those in nursing homes and the problem of nosocomial infection—that is, infection caused by contact with others involved in the elderly care experience. The problem calls for targeted solutions by those close to the vulnerable individuals.
Anders Tegnell talks to Nature about the nation’s ‘trust-based’ approach to tackling the pandemic. Anders Tegnell talks to Nature about the nation’s ‘trust-based’ approach to tackling the pandemic. Anders Tegnell attends a press conference in Solna, Sweden
This paper discusses internal dynamics of the firm that contribute to the failure of knowledge conditions, using the Enron scandal as a case study. Ability of the board to effectively monitor conduct at operational levels includes various dynamics: senior management being isolated from those at operational levels; individuals pursuing subgoals that are contrary to overall corporate goals; information flow along a narrow linear channel that effectively forecloses adverse information from getting to senior management; a corporate culture of intimidation, discouraging open expressions of doubt or skepticism, resulting in reluctance to challenge senior officials, and pushing the limits of ethics and the law.
Elements of information blockage in the corporation include: the "law of diminishing control"; deliberate concealment of information by officers; motivation to report to the boss what one perceives the boss wants to hear; theory of "bounded rationality" that explains surprising role of irrationality in decisionmaking – unconscious emotions and motivations. Discussion of behavioralist studies of cognitive dissonance, belief perseverance, confirmatory bias, entity effect, motivated reasoning, group cohesion or "groupthink," and the false consensus effect. Problem of overoptimism – tendency of many people to overrate their own abilities, contributions and talents – and tendency toward puffery and dismissal of risks in formulating disclosures and press releases.
Imposing liability on directors for failure of oversight is extremely difficult to sustain in a court of law. Directors are likely to face much greater demands of accountability in the wake of Enron. Solutions to enhance flow of information include programs to encourage employees to expose wrongdoing without fear of retribution; devising of communication system that enables important information to move upward to the proper decisionmaker without getting distorted; restructuring of audit committees, providing adequate training for new directors, expanding the number of independent directors on the board. In the wake of Enron, corporations may simply have no choice but to meet increased demands by workers, shareholders, customers and the government for greater accountability.
Appendix to paper discusses the history of the corporation, moral dilemmas of the shareholder-centric model, and whether important social goods sometimes trump the notion of profit-maximization.
During the past decade the world experienced two simultaneous revolutions. First, a wave of democratization either replaced or challenged authoritarian regimes, beginning in Latin America in the early 1980s, and later in Eastern Europe and the Asian Pacific Rim. Second, there was a move away from state involvement in the economy and a shift toward market economics and the establishment of what some have called neo-liberal policymaking. How are these dual revolutions linked? Do they complement each other, or do they involve inherently conflicting principles? There has been a great deal of debate regarding the simultaneous transition toward democracy and the market? Practically all students of these phenomena contend that conflict between these two trends is inevitable. The first requires the representation of particular interests; the second often involves the distribution of social costs among these same interests. That is, glasnost gives those who may lose through perestroika the opportunity to challenge structural adjustments and to frustrate attempts to change the economic and social status quo. The experience of new regimes in Latin America and Eastern Europe, and the subsequent conflicts between the need to enlist political support and the necessity to enforce new economic policies suggest a potential contradiction, at least in the short term, between democratic norms and the imposition of market mechanisms. In the early stages of transition, therefore, a state must chose which reform agenda will take precedence. What will determine this policy preference? To answer these questions, we might begin with an analysis of the newly empowered elites and the policymaking process within these new regimes. One outstanding and apparently universal characteristic of the new administrations is the very high number of personnel who are
Using the Public Choice approach, this paper gives an explanation as to why in representative democracies, in which political entrepreneurs attempt to maximize utility, an incentive-oriented environmental policy has hardly any chance of being implemented. We discuss two main aspects: first, the reasons which make it difficult to enforce any kind of environmental policy in the competitive political environment. And second, why such a policy—if it can be implemented at all—is very often enacted with inefficient instruments. In order to give a satisfactory explanation of these ‘execution deficits’, we differentiate between voters’, politicians’, interest groups’, and bureaucracies’ behavior to show that there are conflicts with other policies, and that individual rationality may be the greatest obstacle in implementing most incentive-oriented environmental policies. In the final section we provide five suggestions for overcoming these difficulties.
We study people's willingness to trade off civil liberties for increased health security in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic by deploying representative surveys involving around 550,000 responses across 15 countries. We document significant heterogeneity across groups in willingness to sacrifice rights: citizens disadvantaged by income, education, or race are less willing to sacrifice rights than their more advantaged peers in every country. Leveraging naturally occurring variation and experimental approaches, we estimate a one standard deviation increase in health insecurity increases willingness to sacrifice civil liberties by 68–83 percent of the difference between the average Chinese and US citizen. (JEL D12, D91, I12, I18, K38, O17, P36)
The Indian federation is highly centripetal, and historically, this has left states without the requisite legislative and fiscal authority to take independent action and initiate policies of significance. Consequently, India's response to the global COVID‐19 pandemic was to impose a very severe countrywide lockdown using the mandate of the Union (federal) government. This centralized one‐size‐fits‐all diktat was imposed despite high variations across states in resources, healthcare capacity, and incidence of COVID‐19 cases. We argue that India's dysfunctional federalism is the reason for the centralized lockdown, preventing state and local governments from tailoring a policy response to suit local needs. Using mobility data, we demonstrate the high variation in curtailing mobility in different states through the centralized lockdown. We find that India's centralized lockdown was at best a partial success in a handful of states, while imposing enormous economic costs even in areas where few were affected by the pandemic.
Stay‐at‐home orders curtailed the individual liberty of those across the United States. Governors of some states moved swiftly to impose the lockdowns. Others delayed and a few even refused to implement these policies. We explore common narratives of what determines the speed of implementation, namely partisanship and virus exposure. While correlation exists, we show that the most consistent explanation for the speed of the implementation of these orders is the state's economic freedom. It was the economically unfree states that issued stay‐at‐home orders earlier.
How can public policy best deal with infectious disease? In answering this question, scholarship on the optimal control of infectious disease adopts the model of a benevolent social planner who maximizes social welfare. This approach, which treats the social health planner as a unitary “public health brain” standing outside of society, removes the policymaking process from economic analysis. This paper opens the black box of the social health planner by extending the tools of economics to the policymaking process itself. We explore the nature of the economic problem facing policymakers and the epistemic constraints they face in trying to solve that problem. Additionally, we analyze the incentives facing policymakers in their efforts to address infectious diseases and consider how they affect the design and implementation of public health policy. Finally, we consider how unanticipated system effects emerge due to interventions in complex systems, and how these effects can undermine well‐intentioned efforts to improve human welfare. We illustrate the various dynamics of the political economy of state responses to infectious disease by drawing on a range of examples from the COVID‐19 pandemic.
What is the relationship, if any, between economic freedom and pandemics? This paper addresses this question from a robust political economy approach. As is the case with recovery from natural disasters or warfare, a society that is relatively free economically offers economic actors greater flexibility to adapt to pandemics. We argue that societies that are more economically free will be more robust to the impact from pandemics, illustrated by shorter time for economic recovery. We illustrate this relationship by testing how initial levels of economic freedom (at the start of the major influenza pandemics of the 20th century) temper contractions and accelerate recoveries for 20 OECD countries.
We argue that the policy response to the COVID‐19 pandemic by all levels of government around the world is not consistent with recommendations from standard welfare economics. Thus, it is important to ask why such policies have been adopted. That opens the door to examining the political economy of the COVID‐19 pandemic. This requires examining the incentives and information that confront policymakers and voters and the institutional environments that shape their incentives and information. This lead article frames questions addressed in the remainder of the symposium.
In response to the COVID‐19 pandemic, governments around the world issued stay‐at‐home orders, which required that individuals stay at home unless they were engaging in certain activities. Often these orders would designate certain goods and services as “essential” and would permit individuals engaged in the production, delivery, and purchase of those goods and services to leave their homes to do so. Implicit in these policies, of course, is the assumption that policymakers can know ex ante which goods and services are essential. As proved true while these stay‐at‐home orders were in effect, essentialness is necessarily subjective and depends on knowledge that is often dispersed, inarticulate, and changes over time. Policymakers, however, do not and often cannot have access to the local knowledge needed to determine ex ante which goods and services are essential, and they lack the feedback mechanisms they would need to adroitly adapt when circumstances change. This paper examines these knowledge problems associated with designating certain goods and services as “essential” when crafting and implementing stay‐at‐home orders.
To gain insight into how Chinese state media is communicating about the coronavirus pandemic to the outside world, we analyzed a collection of posts from their English-language presence on Facebook. We observed three recurring behaviors: sharing positive stories and promoting the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) pandemic response, rewriting recent history in a manner favorable to the CCP as the coronavirus pandemic evolved, and using targeted ads to spread preferred messages. Although spin is not unique to state actors, paid ad campaigns to promote government-run state media pages containing misinformation and conspiracies are problematic. Our findings suggest that platforms should implement clearer disclosure of state-sponsored communications at a minimum, and consider refusing paid posts from such entities.
The evolving coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) epidemic1 is certainly cause for concern. Proper communication and optimal decision‐making is an ongoing challenge, as data evolve. The challenge is compounded, however, by exaggerated information. This can lead to inappropriate actions. It is important to differentiate promptly the true epidemic from an epidemic of false claims and potentially harmful actions.
The humble idea that experts are ordinary human beings leads to surprising conclusions about how to get the best possible expert advice. All too often, experts have monopoly power because of licensing restrictions or because they are government bureaucrats protected from both competition and the consequences of their decisions. This book argues that, in the market for expert opinion, we need real competition in which rival experts may have different opinions and new experts are free to enter. But the idea of breaking up expert monopolies has far-reaching implications for public administration, forensic science, research science, economics, America's military-industrial complex, and all domains of expert knowledge. Roger Koppl develops a theory of experts and expert failure, and uses a wide range of examples - from forensic science to fashion - to explain the applications of his theory, including state regulation of economic activity.
When the history of the financial crisis, stock market crash, and ensuing recession of 2007-2009 is written, the appropriate focus would be on the role that "expertise" played in almost every chapter of the story. From the expertise of the mathematicians who guided the models used by financial institutions, to the expertise of those who developed new kinds of mortgage instruments that required very low down payments, to the expertise of US policymakers who told us that new regulations to encourage more widespread homeownership would be an engine of economic growth and prosperity, the actions of those who knew better eventually littered the financial landscape with their errors. In addition to the prior list, which is hardly exhaustive, perhaps the most central set of experts in the story were those associated with the Federal Reserve System, the US central bank. The Fed rarely shies away from using its expertise to cloak its choices in a cloud of jargon and technicalities, even as its every move has significant effects across the US economy and the whole globe. The Fed's decisions to keep interest rates so low after 9/11 and to seize unprecedented powers in the wake of the recession that inevitably followed that earlier policy were both the latest examples of the history of the Fed's ever-increasing claims to expertise that have led to expanding powers and new and more damaging mistakes.
The All Seeing Eye? Did you know that you are probably a believer in the All Seeing Eye? The odds are that I’m right—why? Well, the bulk of mainstream vision literature blindly relies on the All Seeing Eye. It is written all over papers, albeit between the lines. Understandably so, for scientists resent being exposed as ‘believers’. The All Seeing Eye concept is inconsistent, and at odds with empirical scientific facts, as is painfully obvious when made explicit. But alternatives are sadly lacking. Small wonder it remains implicit ‘background’ (Searle, 1985). The All Seeing Eye has been with us since the dawn of time. ‘God’s Eye’ in churches reminds youngsters that no sin goes unpunished.(1) The ‘Eye of Providence’ appears in the Great Seal of the United States,(2) and on the dollar bill. The All Seeing Eye can perhaps be traced to the Eye of Horus of Egyptian mythology. In Hinduism it appears as the ‘third eye’ of Shiva.
The strength of the Swedish Social Democracy implies that Sweden is a critical case for theory about social capital. First, what is the relation between the encompassing welfare programs and social capital? Second, what is the effect on civil society of the neo-corporatist relations between the government and major interest organizations? Using both archival and survey data, the result is that the sharp decline in social capital since the 1950s in the United States has no equivalence in Sweden. This has to do with the specific way in which social programs have been institutionalized. Social capital may be caused by how government institutions operate and not by voluntary associations.
appreciate the critique ofthe possibility ofrational economiccalcu- lationunder central planning—a critique stated most forcefullyand clearly by Mises, and further developed by Hayek himself. As has been demonstrated by Professor Lavoie (1985), the true import and significance ofthe Hayekian lesson was simply not graspedbysub- sequentwelfareeconomists writingon thesocialistcalculation debate, even though Hayek's work was widely cited. In this paper we attempt both to restate and to extend Hayek's insightconcerning the "knowledge problem" and its implications furcentral economicplanning, whether comprehensive in scope or otherwise. In the following paragraphs wecite Hayek'sown formu- lation ofhis Insight,and make certain observations concernIngIt In subsequent sections of the paper we start from a rather different point of departure, and in this way eventually arrive at our restate- ment and extension of the Hayekian position—spelling out some rather radical Implications ofourrestatement, According to Hayek (1945, pp.71—78):
Besöksförbudet på äldreboenden hävs - trots ökad smitta
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Dödsfall med COVID-19 på särskilda boenden eller i eget hem i Östergötland - Rapport efter journalgranskning
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2020)U.K. resists coronavirus lockdowns goes its own way on response
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Booth, W. (2020) U.K. resists coronavirus lockdowns, goes its own way on response. Washington Post, 15 March.
Mind, market and institutions: the knowledge problem in Hayek's thought. In: FA Hayek as a political economist
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Management is what's wrong with socialism: cost at the expense of value
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Bylund, P.L. (2018) Management is what's wrong with socialism: cost at the expense of value. In: McCaffrey, M.
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Who Believes the Lockdowns Were About Science?Spectator
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2020) Fältsjukhuset i Älvsjö ska avvecklas -användes aldrig
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Wuhan lockdown 'unprecedented' shows commitment to contain virus: WHO representative in China
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Crossley, G. (2020) Wuhan lockdown 'unprecedented', shows commitment to contain virus: WHO representative
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The tyranny of experts: economists, dictators, and the forgotten rights of the poor
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Här sprider sig det nya corona-viruset
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Högt förtroende för Folkhälsomyndigheten.Svenska Dagbladet
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Falkirk, J. (2020) Högt förtroende för Folkhälsomyndigheten. Svenska Dagbladet, March 14.
White House Takes New Line After Dire Report on Death Toll
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Fink, S. (2020) White House Takes New Line After Dire Report on Death Toll. March 16.
Sammankomster på över 50 personer förbjuds
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China is trying to stop the spread of a deadly new virus at the worst possible time of year
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Gan, N. (2020) China is trying to stop the spread of a deadly new virus at the worst possible time of year. CNN,
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