The politics of lockdown policies: Evidence from Brazilian states

Abstract We introduce a novel state‐level measure of lockdown regulatory freedom to study the severity of lockdowns for Brazilian states and its determinants. Our main results show that lockdown policies were not consistently determined by any health‐related variable, such as the number of doctors, hospital beds, the share of the population with private health insurance, or the share of the population 65 years of age and older or Covid‐19 cases and deaths. Indeed, the only variable consistently related to lockdown policies in all specifications and robustness checks was the state's share of votes for the right‐wing candidate. A one standard deviation increase in the share of votes for the right‐wing candidate is associated with a 0.6–0.87 standard deviation increase in lockdown stringency. Our results highlight the importance of political economy considerations in explaining the incentives of policymakers when designing health policies.