POLIPA
Policing the Pandemic
The necessary urgency and spontaneity of measures taken in response to COVID-19 have been an immense shock to routine processes, rendering existing chains of command and systems of checks and balances temporarily inoperable. Simultaneously, the use of police in pandemic response has been a near-global reaction. The rapid onset of ill-defined roles, as well as the lacking clarity or constitutionality of statutory orders, has increased police discretionary powers and forced officers to individually deliberate citizen’s adherence to the novel restrictive measures. Policing the COVID-Pandemic has revealed limits to the democratic repertoire of action, rooted in the structural relationship between the spheres of governance, law-making, and -enforcement. POLIPA aims to provide a timely analysis of these limits and their causes as a necessary condition for a democratic response to the crisis.
Hypotheses
· The crisis reveals limits to a model of democratic governance based on rule of law, separation of powers, and mutual alignment.
· The temporal dimension is central to the analysis of these limits.
· As the persistence of problems cannot be explained only as a function of urgency, their origin must be traced back to structural elements in the relationship between the spheres of governance, law-making, and the police.
Research questions:
How is the COVID-19 pandemic addressed on the level of the government, implemented through law-making, and executed by police in Austria, and which problems have emerged therein?
How does the use of police in pandemic response demonstrate the limits of a democratic repertoire of actions to govern in a crisis, where ad-hoc discretion and exercise of state power infringes on the legal boundaries/guidance of executive action, and what does this reveal about police as an institution within democratic governance?
Approach & Method
POLIPA will employ an interdisciplinary triangulation of methods:
· Critical Discourse Analysis (governmental information, media), reconstructing the pandemic-response timeline
· Legal analysis of the implementation of these measures
· Interviews and focus groups (police officers, on management & ground level), investigating the communication and implementation of measures into practice
· Document analysis of internal communiqués between state actors and police.
Innovation
The study will provide a timely analysis of police-use in the COVID-19 response and the limits to the democratic repertoire of action revealed therein. This quasi-experimental setting will provide original insights into the practices of pandemic response and contribute, on a theoretical level, to addressing an (inter)national research gap on the relationship between democratic rule of law and police as an institution.
POLIPA Publications
Primary Researchers Involved
Runtime
10.2021 - 03.24
Funding
FWF P 34961 Einzelprojekt
von Laufenberg, Adensamer, Herbinger (2021)