The Center welcomes you to join the first Research Seminar of 2023: Towards a Framework for Reform: Internalizing the Politics of the Pandemic Response.

Speaker: Walter D. Valdivia, Senior Scholar and Research Editor, Mercatus Center, GMU and Visiting Researcher at the JHU-UPF Public Policy Center
Research line: Inequalities and Poverty, International Governance and Policy.
Date: Thursday 19, January 2022
Time: 13.00h-14.00h
Location: UPF Campus de la Ciutadella, Edifici Mercè Rodoreda, classroom 24.S19 (floor -1)

Description: In this Research Seminar, Dr. Valdivia will propose three ideas to reform the U.S. governance of pandemic response. This proposal follows from the thesis that, in the U.S., the Covid-19 mitigation measures have done more harm than good at the social level; harm measured in public health and general wellbeing indicators. 

The institutional etiology in that thesis contemplates four factors: (1) The current system of pandemic response grants inordinate and indefinite power to the executive branch; (2) Under a state of exception, executive authority was delegated to experts (scientific and public health experts) who have been true to their professional ethos and values, and doing so, have come up quite short; (3) Expert advice, as an institution, does not internalize well the politics of pandemic response, nor it internalizes the crisis of legitimacy of expert authority that is only heightened by political polarization; (4) Social media has further exacerbated polarization and is instrumental in the producing a generalized mood of sustained dismay, outrage, and distrust. 

The proposed reform includes: 

Idea 1: Congress should pass statutory limits to states of exception declared by the executive branch. 

Idea 2: The executive branch should create response teams blue and red, staffed by equally authoritative experts. The red team would be tasked with poking holes in blue’s plans and offer alternatives. Both response teams should have built-in public engagement mechanisms. 

Idea 3: A declaration of public health crisis should allow the federal government to intervene in social media platforms, to moderate or censure content. 

Researcher biography:
Walter D. Valdivia is a scholar and senior research editor at the Mercatus Center, a think tank housed at George Mason University. Dr Valdivia is a guest editor for Issues in S&T of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, and a senior scientist for the Global Futures Lab at Arizona State University. He has previously worked at the Brookings Institution and U.C. Berkeley and taught at Johns Hopkins University, George Mason University, and Arizona State University.