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Gabriel Cepaluni, Michael Dorsch, Reka Branyiczki: Political Regimes and Deaths in the Early Stages of the Covid-19 Pandemic

“Countries with more democratic political institutions experienced deaths on a larger per capita scale than less democratic countries,” our Research Affiliate Michael Dorsch and co-authors Gabriel Cepaluni (Sao Paulo State University) and Reka Branyiczki (CEU Doctoral School of Political Science) write in their article published in Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice (Bristol University Press).

The article provides a quantitative examination of the link between political institutions and deaths during the first 100 days of the Covid-19 pandemic. 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, the authors 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.

Read the full article here.

Cover photo: Viki Mohamad / Unsplash
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