Pandemic Politics in the Philippines: An Introduction from the Special Issue Editors

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic continues to impact people’s health and livelihood systems around the globe. As governments roll out mass vaccination programs in their respective jurisdictions, it is uncertain whether herd immunity can be achieved at the soonest time, given the mutations and emergence of new COVID-19 variants and vaccine hesitancy on the part of citizens. Meanwhile, political leaders have straddled the thin line between imposing mobility restrictions to save lives and reopening the economy to save jobs. This raised fundamental concerns about the political responses at both domestic and international levels toward the crisis. It is important to examine and compare the political dynamics of the pandemic in various contexts. The articles in this special issue unpack the role of politics in confronting an existential health crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, it delineates three core dimensions of the state necessary to address such a crisis: authority, capacity, and legitimacy (Gisselquist and Vaccaro 2021).