What explains the variation in the ways countries and individuals have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic? Anti-mask protests in the United States, Germany, and England stand in stark contrast to socially-distanced protests in Serbia, Pakistan, and Mexico where doctors and the public have demanded a more robust government response. Countries as diverse as New Zealand, Senegal, Vietnam, and South Korea have been praised for their effective responses to the pandemic, while Brazil, the United States, Mexico, and Sweden have seen their responses criticized both at home and abroad. Scholars of political culture see participating in anti-mask protests or the adoption of specific government response strategies as rooted in human attempts to make sense of the world that occur within particular cultural contexts. We develop a typology of “National Public Health Cultures,” drawing on legal, political, and social indicators measured prior to the pandemic. We use principal component analysis (PCA) along with the experiences of several key countries, including the United States, Germany, Mexico, South Korea, Kenya, and New Zealand, to develop our typology. A systematic analysis of national public health cultures improves our understanding of the varied responses to COVID-19 and integrates the proliferation of single-factor explanations of pandemic-handling success into a broader framework.

This chapter grapples with the possibility that a historical account of rule of law reform might provide both context and insight into reformers’ own attempts to radically critique rule of law reform. I make two arguments. The first is methodological: reformers’ ignorance about the rule of law makes it impossible to conduct an authoritative historical sociology, genealogy, or historicised immanent critique of reformers. The second is historical: I offer a historical account of rule of law reform but frame it as a specific and standalone political intervention. I argue that a standalone profession of ignorant rule of law reformers emerged in the late 1990s or early 2000s, when development ideas about the form and function of institutions shifted from a neoliberal understanding of institutions as a means of giving form to the sublime complexity of the world, to being a complex sublime themselves.