Responding to a global pandemic: a comparative analysis of New Zealand, Taiwan and the United Kingdom

Abstract

The ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic has proven that most States were unprepared and complacent in the face of the imminent epidemic threat that epidemiologists had long warned of. The COVID-19 pandemic confounded the expectations of public policy analysts and epidemiologists alike in terms of which States would fail in their response and which would succeed. This dissertation seeks to identify the causes behind the varying degrees of success or failure initial policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. To do so, it employs a Mill’s Method of difference to compare the two successful cases of Taiwan and New Zealand and the failure case of the United Kingdom. The key result, found by applying Rubin and Bækkeskov’s expert-led securitisation theoretical framework, is that the two successful responses were guided by independent and transparent scientific advisories or semi-autonomous technocratic authorities and the failure case had a politicised scientific advisory that lacked both independence and transparency.