State Power and COVID-19 Vaccination Efforts

The COVID-19 pandemic provides a unique opportunity to assess how different forms of state power shape public health outcomes during a global crisis. Drawing on Michael Mann's distinction between infrastructural and despotic power, we construct a typology of states and evaluate its predictive power for COVID-19 vaccination rates in 161 countries across three pandemic periods (2021, 2022, 2023). Our analysis shows that infrastructural power-a state's capacity to coordinate society and implement policy-was associated with higher vaccination rates, regardless of its level of despotic power. However, the relevance of different state capacities varied across periods: economic resources were critical for securing doses during early scarcity, infrastructural capacity was key for distribution once vaccines became widely available, and low-despotic states proved more successful at "vaccinating the margins" during the final phase. These findings demonstrate that Mann's interactive conception of state power offers a sharper analytical lens than standard proxies like GDP or health security indices, and they reaffirm the role of infrastructural power in effective governance amid transnational crises.