Government political ideology and COVID-19 public health policy responses

Abstract

The global spread of COVID-19 has led to a wide range of pandemic response measures, heterogeneous between countries, varying mostly in time and duration of implementation. Common measures include social distancing, travel restrictions, school closings, bans on public gatherings, investment in healthcare, contact tracing and other public health interventions. Although response measures to COVID-19 in European countries were quite similar in the first moments of the pandemic, different types of measures, with various strictness levels, have been applied in subsequent months, with great diversity among countries, even in the European Union (EU) or European Economic Area (EEA). Governments have played a key role in these decisions. Therefore, it is of particular interest to understand the association between governments' political ideology and the public health policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this workshop, we will reflect on electoral outcomes in the past year in Europe, and discuss how governments' political ideology, including on a left-right axis, affected the strictness, or stringency, of restrictive measures applied in response to the pandemic progression, in conjunction with key variables such as incidence, hospital occupancy rate or test positivity rate. This might have implications for understanding how political ideology might influence public health policies in response to pandemics.