Better Politicians, Fewer Deaths? Municipal Resilience in Overcoming the Pandemic Crisis in Italy

The quality of institutions is widely recognized as a fundamental determinant of public sector performance across various levels of governance. In this paper, we investigate the role of institutional quality in shaping the resilience of Italian municipalities during the COVID-19 pandemic. To this end, we introduce a novel non-parametric approach to construct a resilience index based on historical mortality data, which serves as a counterfactual benchmark, estimated at the local level, for assessing pandemic-related outcomes. This methodology enables a more nuanced and context-specific measurement of resilience. We apply the index to municipal-level mortality data in Italy from 2004 to 2023 to evaluate the heterogeneous ability of municipalities to withstand and recover from the pandemic crisis. By linking this resilience index with detailed municipal-level indicators of institutional quality, we find that higher institutional quality is strongly associated with greater resilience in managing the crisis. Moreover, when disentangling the specific components of institutional quality, we identify the quality of local politicians as the most significant factor driving differential performance. Our results are robust to a variety of sensitivity checks.