Falling Flat? The Impact of State Legitimacy, Capacity, and Political Trust on Flattening the Curve of COVID-19

Abstract

As countries worldwide struggled to contain the COVID-19 pandemic in March and April of 2020, observers often remarked that countries with higher levels of regime legitimacy, state capacity, and political trust were more likely to curtail the spread of the virus. Remarkably, using quantitative data from 10 different sources, this article finds that this generalizable theory runs counter to expectations. Countries with higher levels of political legitimacy, trust, and capacity experienced greater increases in COVID cases during the onset of the pandemic, albeit the strength of these relationships is modest. To develop generalizable theories predicting virus containment, researchers should turn their attention to unique factors characterizing industrialized democracies that make a virus much harder to contain and expand their scope by using transdisciplinary approaches to understanding the pandemic