Do democracies perform worse during pandemics? Evidence from 2020

Yuyang He () and Dominik Naeher ()
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Yuyang He: University College Dublin
Dominik Naeher: University of Goettingen

Economics Bulletin, 2022, vol. 42, issue 3, 1681 - 1687

Abstract: Existing evidence in the emerging literature studying the performance of different political regimes in handling the Covid-19 pandemic is mixed and inconclusive. This paper contributes new insights by using a country-level difference-in-differences estimation strategy to study the effects of democracy on different socio-economic outcomes during the first year of the pandemic. We find that democracies suffered stronger reductions in GDP growth rates and larger increases in unemployment rates than autocracies. However, the better performance of autocracies in these economic indicators does not seem to translate into higher levels of citizens' self-reported happiness. Unlike previous studies, we find that both types of political regimes featured similar increases in mortality rates, on average, in 2020.

Keywords: Democracy; Public health; Covid-19; Pandemic; Difference-in-differences estimation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H1 P4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-09-30
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