State Building in Crisis Governance: Donald Trump and COVID-19
Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: THE STORY OF AMERICAN STATE BUILDING is one in which crisis, once episodic, has become a routine feature of American politics. At the heart of this development is the modern executive: emergency powers are presidential powers. The principal objective of this article is to highlight institutional developments since the late 1960s that framed the Donald Trump administration’s actions during the COVID-19 pandemic and currently roil the American state: the expansion of administrative power in the White House, which is largely unconstrained by the institutional imperatives of the bureaucracy, Congress, or state governments, and the emergence of the modern executive as the repository of party responsibility, with both Democrats and Republicans dependent on presidents for messaging, fundraising, mobilization, and programmatic action. Together, these developments form a dynamic of executive-centered partisanship—a merging of partisanship and executive prerogative characterized by presidential unilateralism, social activism, and polarizing struggles about national identity that divide the nation by race, ethnicity, and religion.
Source: Political Science Quarterly
DOI: 10.1002/polq.13351
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4281795013