Kinder, gentler – and crisis-proof? Consensus democracy, inclusive institutions and COVID-19 pandemic performance

Abstract

Which patterns of democracy perform best? Although a decades-long research tradition has fairly robustly suggested that consensual democracies outperform their Westminster-style majoritarian counterparts, the scope of previous studies has been limited to ‘normal times’. In this article, the endogenous context of the COVID-19 pandemic is leveraged to study whether the alleged superiority of consensualism also holds during crises. It is hypothesised that, in addition to consensus democracy, inclusive institutions – i.e. cabinet size and interest-group corporatism – enhance crisis-related performance. Drawing on new and original data, cross-sectional and hierarchical time-series regression analyses show that horizontal power-sharing and the number of ministers substantively reduced excess mortality, while the structure of the interest-group system had no effect. Although established consensus democracies can draw on their built-in institutional assets even during crises, our findings indicate that majoritarian systems may, as a compensatory performance-enhancing tool, flexibly gear up for crisis-induced necessities by adding more ministers to the cabinet.