Democracy in crisis -- Pandemic resilience -- Federalism is an asset -- A transformed peace: an agenda for healing our social contract.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented an important case study, on a global scale, of how democracy works - and fails to work - today. From leadership to citizenship, from due process to checks and balances, from globalization to misinformation, from solidarity within and across borders to the role of expertise, key democratic concepts both old and new are now being put to the test. The future of democracy around the world is at issue as today's governments manage their responses to the pandemic. Bringing together some of today's most creative thinkers, these essays offer a variety of inquiries into democracy during the global pandemic with a view to imagining post-crisis political conditions. Representing different regions and disciplines, including law, politics, philosophy, religion, and sociology, eighteen voices offer different outlooks - optimistic and pessimistic - on the future.

Covid-19 has highlighted limitations in our democratic politics – but also lessons for how to deepen our democracy and more effectively respond to future crises. In the face of an emergency, the working assumption all too often is that only a centralised, top-down response is possible. This book exposes the weakness of this assumption, making the case for deeper participation and deliberation in times of crises. During the pandemic, mutual aid and self-help groups have realised unmet needs. And forward-thinking organisations have shown that listening to and working with diverse social groups leads to more inclusive outcomes. Participation and deliberation are not just possible in an emergency. They are valuable, perhaps even indispensable. This book draws together a diverse range of voices of activists, practitioners, policy makers, researchers and writers. Together they make visible the critical role played by participation and deliberation during the pandemic and make the case for enhanced engagement during and beyond emergency contexts. Another, more democratic world can be realised in the face of a crisis. The contributors to this book offer us meaningful insights into what this could look like.

This book, one of the first of its kind, explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on modern Western democracies from a comparative constitutional law and policy perspective. Through 11 scholarly contributions, it tackles cutting-edge topics for the liberal state, such as emergency legislation, judicial scrutiny of COVID-19 measures, parliamentarism and executive decision-making during the pandemic. The book examines these topics both from a microscopic national constitutional angle, with a focus on European states, and from a macroscopic regional and comparative angle, on par with the American example. The COVID-19 pandemic is thus treated as an international state of emergency that has enabled far-reaching restrictions on essential human rights, such as freedom of movement, freedom of religion or even major political rights, while giving rise to the ‘administrative state.’ This edited volume explores each of these pressing themes in this exceptional context and evaluates different liberal states’ responses to the pandemic. Were these responses reasonable, effective and democratic? Or is the COVID-19 pandemic just the beginning of a new era of global democratic backsliding? How can liberal democracies manage similar crises in future? What lessons have we learned? The institutional knowledge gained turns out to be the key for the future of the rule of law.

David Seedhouse highlights the alarming irrelevance of inclusive democracy in the governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, asking why decision-makers so readily ignored centuries of hard-won civil freedoms? Why were we so easily controlled and why were our controllers so willing to do it? Before suggesting that this flawed governmental response is the perfect argument for an extensive, participatory democracy.

One moment life was normal, the next, governments around the world were imposing radical lockdowns of their populations. But why were decision-makers so readily ignoring centuries of hard-won civil freedoms? Where was the discussion of ethics and human rights? Why were we so easily controlled and why were our controllers so willing to do it? In The Case for Democracy, David Seedhouse explores the psychological biases; distorted risk perceptions; frenetic journalism; the disputed science; the narrow focus of ′experts′; value judgements dressed up as truths; propaganda; the invisibility of ethics; and the alarming irrelevance of inclusive democracy that have been features of governmental responses to the covid-19 pandemic. Seedhouse argues that the chaotic governmental response to Coronavirus, with no attempt to include the public, is the perfect argument for an extensive, participatory democracy; a democracy that demonstrates practical decision making by listening to everyone’s knowledge and expertise. Now is the time for us to solve our problems together.

COVID-19 is the most significant global crisis of any of our lifetimes. The numbers have been stupefying, whether of infection and mortality, the scale of public health measures, or the economic consequences of shutdown. Coronavirus Politics identifies key threads in the global comparative discussion that continue to shed light on COVID-19 and shape debates about what it means for scholarship in health and comparative politics. Editors Scott L. Greer, Elizabeth J. King, Elize Massard da Fonseca, and André Peralta-Santos bring together over 30 authors versed in politics and the health issues in order to understand the health policy decisions, the public health interventions, the social policy decisions, their interactions, and the reasons. The book’s coverage is global, with a wide range of key and exemplary countries, and contains a mixture of comparative, thematic, and templated country studies. All go beyond reporting and monitoring to develop explanations that draw on the authors' expertise while engaging in structured conversations across the book.