State Power and COVID‐19 Vaccination Efforts
Abstract
ABSTRACT The COVID‐19 pandemic provides a unique opportunity to assess how different forms of state power shape public health outcomes during a global crisis. Drawing on Michael Mann's distinction between infrastructural and despotic power, we construct a typology of states and evaluate its predictive power for COVID‐19 vaccination rates in 161 countries across three pandemic periods (2021, 2022, 2023). Our analysis shows that infrastructural power—a state's capacity to coordinate society and implement policy—was associated with higher vaccination rates, regardless of its level of despotic power. However, the relevance of different state capacities varied across periods: economic resources were critical for securing doses during early scarcity, infrastructural capacity was key for distribution once vaccines became widely available, and low‐despotic states proved more successful at “vaccinating the margins” during the final phase. These findings demonstrate that Mann's interactive conception of state power offers a sharper analytical lens than standard proxies like GDP or health security indices, and they reaffirm the role of infrastructural power in effective governance amid transnational crises.
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Record history
| When | Event | Field | Old | New |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-06-18 19:37:53.011249+00:00 | identifier_assigned | DSEID | DSEID-001-4535274 |