ENDURE: Inequalities, Community Resilience and New Governance Modalities in a Post-Pandemic World

This research combines methodologies from history, communications, and social and behavioral sciences to study how restrictive COVID-19 policies affected economic, political, and social inequalities, and how people responded to these policies. Specifically the research project will study (i) how state-led pandemic responses generated inequalities; (ii) how these pandemic responses led to the rise of 課ﾏpopulist課 movements, and (iii) how inequality led to resistance to policies to deal with the pandemic. The general demobilizing approach to the pandemic had differential impacts on different groups and likely deepened existing social inequalities. This research project will uses a comparative approach to conduct research in Brazil, Germany, Colombia, United Kingdom, Canada, Finland, United States, Croatia, Poland, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Turkey to study how different degrees of restrictions affected inequality and how different groups responded to various pandemic policies. These countries provide a broad set of policy responses to provide a better understanding of how difference restrictive policies imposed by countries affected policy compliance as well as inequality. The results of this research project will provide inputs into developing pandemic and other emergency policies that will be acceptable to all and thus make them effective. The results could also help establish the US a global leader in pandemic response policies. This research investigates how restrictive state-led Covid-19 pandemic response---demobilization and lock-downs---impacted the drivers of inequality in Europe, North America, and South America. The project employs a transatlantic comparative analysis of the consequences of capacity of governments and international organizations on inequality and democratic governance. It examines how the pandemic impacted populist, anti-establishment narratives in politics and the media to understand how emergencies impact trust and legitimacy of institutions. This part of the study will be based on both quantitative and qualitative analysis of social media. The project will also study how marginalized people survived and resisted restrictive policies during the pandemic as well as influence policy discussions. This part of the project will employ several social and behavioral science methods. The project will organize seminars, digital galleries, webinars, academic conferences, and other public events in order to influence policy debates. The results of this research could provide inputs into efficient pandemic and other emergency policies that will be acceptable to the majority of people. The results could also help establish the US a global leader in pandemic response policies. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.