Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP15722
Authors: Gokhan Karabulut; Klaus F. Zimmermann; Mehmet Huseyin Bilgin; Asli Cansin Doker
Abstract: More democratic countries are often expected to fail at providing a fast, strong, and effective response when facing a crisis such as COVID-19. This could result in higher infections and more negative health effects, but hard evidence to prove this claim is missing for the new disease. Studying the association with five different democracy measures, this study shows that while the infection rates of the disease do indeed appear to be higher for more democratic countries so far, their observed case fatality rates are lower. There is also a negative association between case fatality rates and government attempts to censor media. However, such censorship relates positively to the infection rate.
Keywords: democracy; COVID-19; coronavirus; pandemic; lockdown; media censoring
JEL Codes: D72; C30; P16; I19
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| democracy measures (D72) | COVID-19 infection rates (Y10) |
| democracy measures (D72) | COVID-19 case fatality rates (Y10) |
| media censorship (L96) | COVID-19 infection rates (Y10) |