Authoritarian and democratic states: the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of public health outcomes

Abstract There is a populist narrative that authoritarian regimes were better able to respond to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic because of their strict enforcement powers, compliance of citizens, and speed of autocratic decision-making in a crisis. Research evidence to date on this assertion is however inconclusive or inconsistent. This paper analyses data from democratic and authoritarian countries with the aim of finding out whether autocratic regimes, using greater stringency measures (policy interventions to tackle COVID-19), had better public health outcomes than their counterparts. The results show that authoritarian regimes performed better in tackling the pandemic in terms of infection and death rates than their counterparts. However, we did not find any empirical evidence on the moderation effect of trust in government on the relationship between stringency measures against COVID-19 and policy outcomes. This result might be due to the lack of data transparency in authoritarian countries.