The Politics of COVID-19 and Weber’s Bureaucratic Public Administration Theory

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic currently ravaging the world, sacking communities, distorting national plans, challenging institutional management, impoverishing hitherto stable families, fuelling conspiracy theories, and instigating global hegemonic politics, is a social crisis with inestimable contradictions. This paper examined the impact of Covid-19 pandemic on the management of public institutions based on Max Weber’s bureaucratic theory.  The central objective of the paper was to critically analyse the relationship between the State, the elite and the bureaucratic institutions in efforts to stabilise the system and maintain privileges during a national emergency like the Covid-19 pandemic. Elite theory espoused by Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, Roberto Michels, C. Wright Mills and Max Weber was adopted as the theoretical framework. As a study in political and administrative theory secondary sources of data were utilized and analysed based on textual and content interrogation of extant literature and reports on the Covid-19 pandemic. One of the major findings is that while the pandemic itself was colour-blind and operated as a leveller the existing social structure had ensured that fatalities were tilted against coloured and lower class citizens across the world. Consequently, the paper concluded that the management of the pandemic had rather than follow established rational bureaucratic principles been highly politicized and accordingly exposed the inadequacies of elite rule in emergency management in many countries, particularly Africa. The paper therefore recommended that existing class and racial cleavages need to be bridged in order for advances in medical science to serve humanity effectively and dispassionately.

Key words: Covid-19, Bureaucracy, Domination, Elite, Administration