2021/08/30 by Gabriel Cepaluni, Michael Dorsch, Réka Branyiczki · 1 voice
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Mathematics · Social Sciences · #COVID-19 Pandemic Impacts #COVID-19 epidemiological studies #Income, Poverty, and Inequality
paper · pdf · doi:10.1332/251569121x16268740317724
openalex publication_date 2021/08/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
This article provides a quantitative examination of the link between political institutions and deaths during the first 100 days of the COVID-19 pandemic. We demonstrate that countries with more democratic political institutions experienced deaths on a larger per capita scale than less democratic countries. The result is robust to the inclusion of many relevant controls, a battery of estimation techniques and estimation with instrumental variables for the institutional measures. Additionally, we examine the extent to which COVID-19 deaths were impacted heterogeneously by policy responses across types of political institutions. Policy responses in democracies were less effective in reducing deaths in the early stages of the crisis. The results imply that democratic political institutions may have a disadvantage in responding quickly to pandemics.