Annaka Susumu
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hirosaki University, Japan.
Int J Disaster Risk Reduct. 2022 Dec;83:103437. doi: 10.1016/j.ijdrr.2022.103437. Epub 2022 Nov 12.
Some studies claim that democracy is in crisis during the current pandemic while authoritarian countries better combat COVID-19 because they face no tradeoff between freedom and health. These claims, however, are usually supported by unreliable reported data; furthermore, they often overlook an important variation in government effectiveness that is likely to interact with different political regimes. In this paper, I use as the dependent variable more reliable data, excess mortality, which is available for 152 countries, and analyze the interaction effect between regime type and government effectiveness. The results reveal that democratic countries with higher government effectiveness are likely to reduce excess mortality. Democratic countries thus need not give up freedom; they need to improve government effectiveness to combat COVID-19.
一些研究称，在当前这场大流行期间，民主正处于危机之中，而威权国家在抗击新冠疫情方面表现更佳，因为它们在自由与健康之间不存在权衡取舍。然而，这些说法通常是由不可靠的报告数据支撑的；此外，它们往往忽视了政府效能方面的一个重要差异，而这种差异很可能与不同的政治体制相互作用。在本文中，我使用更可靠的数据——超额死亡率作为因变量，该数据适用于152个国家，并分析政体类型与政府效能之间的相互作用效应。结果显示，政府效能较高的民主国家更有可能降低超额死亡率。因此，民主国家无需放弃自由；它们需要提高政府效能以抗击新冠疫情。
