Democratic Regimes and Epidemic Deaths

Abstract

Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a new approach to conceptualization and measurement of democracy. The headquarters -the V-Dem Institute -is based at the University of Gothenburg with 23 staff. The project includes a worldwide team with 5 Principal Investigators, 19 Project Managers, 33 Regional Managers, 134 Country Coordinators, Research Assistants, and 3,500 Country Experts. The V-Dem project is one of the largest ever social science research-oriented data collection programs.

States or social networks? Popular attitudes amid health crises in the Middle East and North Africa

“…To begin with, we rely on the literature that juxtaposes mechanisms inherent to democratic accountability with those associated with authoritarian action. In this perspective, some scholars have pointed to the advantages of democracies in pandemic crisis management (McMann and Tisch, 2021). Their premise is that elected officials most forcefully allocate public goods across a broad range of societal actors, rather than small constituencies in support of smaller, authoritarian ruling coalitions.…”

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

“…Indeed, aside from the COVID-19 context, some of the most recent studies which cover a long historical period continue to uphold the democratic advantage in coping with public health challenges. McMann and Tisch [ 35 ], for example, estimate that democracy has reduced epidemic deaths in countries by approximately 70% since 1900 [ 11 , 12 ]. show that democracy and/or democratization have lowered infant mortality for over a century, one of the most often used indicators of human development.…”

Female Legislators Decrease Epidemic Deaths

“…Furthermore, despite existing studies exploring the link between political institutions and HIV/AIDS through panel data analysis (Gizelis, 2009;Maynard and Ong, 2016), there remains a notable gap in research addressing the relationship with epidemics more broadly, barring a few exceptions (McMann and Tisch, 2021). This gap is particularly noteworthy in light of the historical global focus on epidemics prior to the advent of COVID-19 (Diamond, 1999).…”

“…This research aims to delineate the causal dynamics between female political leadership and epidemic mortality rates. We source our dependent variable from the EM-DAT database (Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, 2023), which exhaustively catalogs epidemic fatalities by country from 1900 to 2019 (McMann and Tisch, 2021) 1 . This database has been instrumental in a multitude of prior studies (Rieckmann et al, 2018;Talisuna et al, 2020;McMann and Tisch, 2021).…”