PoliSEAmaking: Accountabilities in Economic Responses to COVID-19 of Southeast Asian Governments

Abstract

This paper examines the connection between governments’ accountability and their responses to the global economic crisis caused by COVID-19 through the lens of competing principals approach. Given that governments’ sense of accountability towards groups of principals may vary, it may affect the policy outcomes as well. In the case of Covid-19 pandemic, the dilemma manifests in the extent to which the governments spend their resources on economic assistance to the people. By using the ever-growing corpus of data on economic responses, such as The Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) as well as the compilation of several measures for political accountabilities, regime types, and COVID-related public health, this study finds that, unlike other regions in the world, the only type of accountability predicting Southeast Asian (SEA) governments’ level of economic support to the people is diagonal accountability leveraged by the media and civil societies (CSOs). This finding not only illustrates the dilemma faced by the governments as an agent in a multi-principal scenario, but also indicate that a) SEA governments generally do not feel directly liable to its people; b) they do not feel pressured by the check and balances mechanisms of formal institutions, either; and c) they only feel obligated to do something when the issue is being publicized in the news or mobilized by the CSOs.