COVID-19 and State Capacity in Latin America

This open access book analyses Latin American countries’ state capacity based on these countries’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The causes and consequences of uneven state capacity have been a popular academic debate in social welfare provision during the last decades. The pandemic raises further concerns. The making and implementation of infection-preventive measures have relied on the capability of the state authority to deploy health infrastructure, provide timely and extensive health services, and mobilize policy tools to build desirable collective action either by coercive or non-coercive means. In this sense, the global pandemic “presents a rare naturally occurring experiment” to draw comparative lessons.

Additionally, amid the burgeoning COVID-19 literature worldwide, Latin America stood out as a region that provides an important reference to the comparative perspective on the global pandemic. It unfolded one of the worst scenarios, particularly during the first year of the pandemic, evident in the major indicators such as infected cases, death tolls, and mortality rates. So, not all of the Global South hit the score evenly, making Latin America remarkably worse in inter-regional terms than Africa and Asia, making it one of the epicenters of the pandemic. Academic studies have added nuance to this picture by suggesting intra-regional variations. Latin American countries differed in many critical ways, including early successes and failures in containing virus spreads, political leadership and coordination, and measures taken for social distancing. Subnational variations were also remarkable in federal regimes. This multi-layered diversity thus provides seedbeds for the identification and test of theoretical puzzles.

COVID-19 and State Capacity in Latin America: Comparative Perspectives on Responses to the Pandemic will be a valuable resource for political scientists and researchers from many other disciplines within the social sciences interested in the study of state capacity and social welfare provision.