Politics Rules Everything Around Me? A Review of Pandemic Politics

Abstract

Although COVID-19 is still very much around, we have reached the stage of the pandemic where we begin to look back and analyze our response to this crisis. It is, however, a monumental task to piece information together from thousands upon thousands of published articles about the pandemic from different academic disciplines. Gadarian, Goodman, and Pepinsky's book, Pandemic Politics, is an authoritative guide that walks us through the American pandemic response, using state-of-the-art multiwave panel data. The argument of the book tells a compelling, coherent, and, ultimately, depressing story about how America's four “preexisting conditions”—political polarization, Donald Trump, a troubled health care system, and systemic inequalities—set the stage for a perfect storm in which the politics dominated public health, culminating in a disastrous pandemic response. In this review article, I situate the book's argument in a broader literature on politicization of science, the importance of populism and anti-intellectualism, misinformation, and trust, filling in some of the considerations the authors omitted from their analyses.