Abstract

Policy response to the Covid-19 pandemic created vastly different results across the globe. The typology of political regime could play a part in a nation's ability to mobilize an effective pandemic response. Over the years of 2010 to 2020, the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute reported a global decline in liberal democracy. This decade of autocratization, the process of a nation becoming more authoritarian, was capped off by a worldwide pandemic, during which nations of the world committed a multitude of abuses of emergency power. This study aims to explore the effect this decline of liberal democracies had upon Covid-19’s impact, proposing the hypothesis that the nations of the world who experienced autocratization over the prior decade in turn experienced worsened pandemic response. This study merges Our World In Data Covid-19 data with the V-Dem Country-Year: V-Dem Core dataset, creates a 2020-2010 difference variable for the Liberal Democracy Index (LDI), and analyzes via linear regression the effects the differences have upon Covid-19 cases and deaths across all political regimes and specific regime typology. Results of these tests reveal that for liberal democratic, electoral democratic, and for authoritarian nations there are multiple statistically significant correlations between differences in LDI and Covid-19 pandemic impact.

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