Blessing or Curse of Democracy?: Current Evidence from the Covid-19 Pandemic

Background: A major question in Covid-19 research is whether democracies handled the Covid-19 pandemic crisis better or worse than authoritarian countries. However, it is important to consider the issues of democracy versus authoritarianism, and state fragility, when examining official Covid-19 death counts in research, because these factors can influence the accurate reporting of pandemic deaths by governments. In contrast, excess deaths are less prone to variability in differences in definitions of Covid-19 deaths and testing capacities across countries. Here we use excess pandemic deaths to explore potential relationships between political systems and public health outcomes. Methods: We address these issues by comparing the official government Covid-19 death counts in a well-established John Hopkins database to the generally more reliable excess mortality measure of Covid-19 deaths, taken from the recently released World Mortality Dataset. We put the comparison in the context of the political and fragile state dimensions. Findings: We find (1) significant potential underreporting of Covid-19 deaths by authoritarian governments and governments with high state fragility and (2) substantial geographic variation among countries and regions with regard to standard democracy indices. Additionally, we find that more authoritarian governments are (weakly) associated with more excess deaths during the pandemic than democratic governments. Interpretations: The inhibition and censorship of information flows, inherent to authoritarian states, likely results in major inaccuracies in pandemic statistics that confound global public health analyses. Thus, both excess pandemic deaths and official Covid-19 death counts should be examined in studies using death as an outcome variable.