Democracies or Authoritarians? Regime Differences in the Efficacy of Handling Covid-19 in 158 Countries

Abstract

A new genre of contestation is seen in the discourse of democracy and governance worldwide concerning efficacy in combating the Covid-19 pandemic, that is, which regime is handling the pandemic better—authoritarian or democratic? As a response to this debate, premised on the practicality that differences in total confirmed cases and deaths reflect the raw quantity of government’s ability to control and handle an infectious disease, we examined differences in the reported number of total confirmed cases and deaths across the categories of political regimes. We used regime classification from the Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) Democratic Index—full democracy, flawed democracy, hybrid and authoritarian regime. The country-wise reported number of Covid-19 confirmed cases and deaths were extracted from World Health Organization’s 6th Weekly Epidemiological Report. The results spotlight that if the democratic countries are inevitably more susceptible to pandemics, then we need to cautiously reassess the notion of public health and pandemics in the context of political regimes.