Good democratic governance can combat COVID-19 - excess mortality analysis

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.