Champions and late bloomers: What determines the speed and stringency of policy decisions in times of crises?

Abstract While the COVID-19 pandemic has come and, to a large extent, has gone, there is still a lot to be learned about political decision-making and effective governance from what the world experienced in 2020 and 2021. Some countries adopted stricter policies right away, while others took more time to increase restrictions aimed to prevent the spread of the virus. Despite the large amount of work on the impact of COVID-19 on various aspects of states development, we still know fairly little about what triggered some countries to start ’higher’ than others (be champions), and what accounts for the amount of time it took late bloomers to become champions (adopt stricter policies quicker). We argue that in addition to the strength of the economy and, in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, the healthcare system, political decision-makers are also pressured by the context of the ’local’ game when they have to adopt policies to manage crises. Thus, we look into the effect of both political and practical pressures on government decision-making. Consistent with veto player theory, we argue that additional cabinet veto players make the adoption of stricter policy harder and the amount of time it takes to reach a decision longer. Using a global cross-sectional time series dataset, we confirm this hypothesis.