This book explores how COVID-19 represents an inflection point for re-thinking and re-making democracy across the English-speaking world in an age where states are facing a future of overlapping crises.
Years after the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic started to unfold, have we yet learned the deep lessons essential to maintaining and improving democracy to meet crisis challenges?
Produced with the benefit of distance from the most acute period of the pandemic, the book contextualises the COVID-19 crisis as revealing pre-existing vulnerabilities and intensifying challenges of governance, inclusion, and distrust, while also spurring democratic innovation and shifting the parameters for reform.
Six national case studies – Australia, Ireland, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, UK and USA – reveal the heterogeneity of the Anglosphere as an imagined democratic space. Viewed in the round, pandemic responses ranged from the chaotic to the internationally lauded, although even the latter have featured acute deficiencies in democratic practice, which underscores the need to gather the lessons learned. Yet, in all states, the public and political temptation to simply move on, in an act of communal forgetting and collective return to “normalcy,” presents a real risk of failing to prepare for more democratic future crisis responses.
This collection takes the long view, approaching its subject from multiple perspectives that examine the heterogeneity of the Anglosphere as an imagined democratic space. Taking a cross-disciplinary approach and bringing together both leading and emerging experts on democracy, constitutionalism, and the rule of law, this book powerfully combines the insights of retrospective analysis with future-focused contemplation of where our democracies are heading.
