Political regime, data transparency, and COVID-19 death cases

Abstract

The COVID-19—the worst pandemic since the Spanish flu—has dramatically changed the world, with a significant number of people suffering from and dying of the disease. Some scholars argue that democratic governments are disadvantaged in coping with the current pandemic mainly because they cannot intervene in their citizens' lives as aggressively as their authoritarian counterparts. Other scholars, however, suggest that possible data manipulation may account for the apparent advantage of authoritarian countries. Taking such a possibility seriously, this paper analyzes the relationship between political regimes, data transparency, and COVID-19 deaths using cross-national data for over 108 countries, obtained from Worldometer COVID-19 Data, Polity V Project, Variety of Democracy (V-Dem) Project, HRV Transparency Project among other sources. Regression analyses indicate that authoritarian countries do not necessarily tend to have fewer COVID-19 deaths than their democratic counterparts after controlling for other factors, especially data transparency. The transparency variable itself, on the other hand, is positively correlated with the number of death cases more consistently ( P <0.05). Overall, the estimation results point to the possible data manipulation, not the nature of regime characteristics itself, as a more significant source for the seemingly low casualty rates in authoritarian countries.

A Spatial Analysis of COVID-19 in African Countries: Evaluating the Effects of Socio-Economic Vulnerabilities and Neighbouring

“…Our study findings are consistent with previous research results that found the prevalence of COVID-19 to be positively correlated with wealthiness, transparency and the proportion of the elderly population [22][23][24][25]39,40]. This finding that countries with higher transparency and wealthiness levels are the ones with higher COVID-19 prevalence is surprising and counterintuitive.…”

“…Another explanation is that rich countries tend to be more democratic, and thus more open to more trade and travel, which accelerates the importation as well as the spread of COVID-19 across borders [41], or that they are more transparent in most spheres including data dissemination, which may limit possible data manipulation [38,40]. Yet another explanation is that, paradoxically, richer countries have relatively larger proportions of their population aged 65 years or more, who are more vulnerable to COVID-19 infections [40].…”

“…On the other hand, poorer countries are mostly undemocratic, giving them an advantage in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic since they can forcedly enforce nonpharmaceutical interventions over their populations [38,40]. It could also be that the low COVID-19 prevalence numbers that have been seen in countries with less economic wealth and worse transparency were due to underreporting of the true number of cases due to their insufficient testing capacity.…”

Cross-country evidence on the role of national governance in boosting COVID-19 vaccination

“…On the one hand, studies show that authoritarian governments performed better during the initial period of the COVID-19 pandemic, as they could legally keep citizens’ behavior under surveillance and enforce social-distancing requirements [ 25 ]. On the other hand, there is also evidence that lower reported deaths in authoritarian countries may be driven by data manipulation [ 26 ]. Given the strong association between democracy and governance [ 27 , 28 ], 4 this study contributes to this argument by adding new evidence that, during the later stage of vaccination administration and achievement of herd immunity, countries with better governance, mostly democratic regimes, have an advantage.…”

Good Democratic Governance Can Combat COVID-19-Excess Mortality Analysis

“…Figure 1: Relationship between political regime variables and number of COVID-19 deaths However, the numbers of COVID-19 cases and deaths are based on government data and can be manipulated, especially in authoritarian countries (Adiguzel et al, 2020; 4 Kapoor et al, 2020). A study says that the positive correlation between political regime and COVID-19 deaths is not found after controlling for other factors, including data transparency (Annaka 2021). The World Health Organization (WHO) argues that only excess mortality can make "true" death estimation possible and said that it "is defined as the difference in the total number of deaths in a crisis compared to those expected under normal conditions.…”