#2021-004 Democracy and COVID-19 Outcomes
Gokhan Karabulut, Klaus F. Zimmermann, Mehmet Huseyin Bilgin & Asli Cansin Doker
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 Classification: D72, C30, P16, I19
