The health of nations: How rule of law and democracy influence COVID-19 response strategies
Date
2021
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Abstract
To control the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, governments around the world
have implemented three broad classes of country-level control measures: containment and closure measures, economic measures, and health system approaches. The
cumulation of the aforementioned policy decisions determines the stringency of a
country’s COVID-19 response. This paper aims to ascertain the political determinants
of response stringency. We conduct ordinary least squares (OLS) and Logistic (logit)
regressions to illustrate the association between a country’s rule of law performance,
level of democracy, and the stringency of its COVID-19 response. Our findings suggest
that COVID-19 response stringency decreases with the adherence to the rule of law and
increases with the level of democracy. Hence, this study presents implications for the
role of institutional trust and the culture of individualism in policy decisions amidst
public health crises.