Decisive Democracies. Regime Type and Government Responses to COVID-19

• In Event: Disaster & Dictatorship: COVID-19 and Beyond

Abstract

Governments around the world have been implementing measures to contain the Covid-19 pandemic. Some measures affect civil liberties cherished by democratic regimes, such as the freedoms of movement and assembly. Scholars and pundits have argued that more authoritarian regimes will exercise less restraint when implementing restrictive Covid measures, and even use the pandemic as a pretext to limit unwanted freedoms.
Less concern for civil liberties would reflect in more severe restrictions implemented more quickly in more authoritarian regimes. We use event history analysis and data from the Oxford Covid-19 Government Response Tracker to examine whether less democratic regimes are more likely to implement restrictions faster.
Contrary to what could be expected, our findings suggest that more authoritarian regimes do not implement constraints more quickly than more democratic regimes. The finding holds across various regime measures and model specifications. In fact, less democratic regimes appear to react slightly slower to the pandemic – albeit findings are subject to rather a lot uncertainty.
Rather than autocracies exploiting the pandemic to curb civil liberties, democracies appear to be more decisive in containing the disease.

Authors

• Alexander Schmotz, WZB Berlin Social Science Center

• Oisin Tansey, King's College London